Michael Kaminer
By Michael Kaminer
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Culture Brutally Frank
Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman By Stuart Weisberg University of Massachusetts Press, 544 pages, $29.95. ‘Get to the point, I’m very busy.” According to Stuart Weisberg’s “Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman,” that’s Congressman Barney Frank’s standard response to phone-chat pleasantries like “How are…
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Culture Pornographic Stimulus Plan
The bearded receptionist wears a yarmulke. In any other office, this wouldn’t seem remarkable. But this is the midtown Manhattan headquarters of Lucas Entertainment, one of the largest gay adult film companies in the world. The yarmulke — worn in memory of a recently departed grandmother, it turns out — seems weirdly apt once you…
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Culture The Queer Queen of Comedy
‘Carol Leifer Gets Weirder: Now Jewish, Lesbian, and Vegan,” an online gossip headline blared after the comedian filmed a Web ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. While most of that line rings true — Leifer is Semitic, same-sex loving and vegan — “weird” is the last word that comes to mind for…
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News Father Patrick Desbois: A Priest on a Holocaust Mission
If the Rev. Patrick Desbois is bothered by the glances from late-lunching tourists at a midtown Manhattan hotel café, he’s not letting it show. These Friday afternoon guests probably didn’t expect to hear about mass graves, murdered babies and Nazi killing machines over their cappuccinos and sandwiches. But Desbois, in a casual black shirt and…
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News Furor Over Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition
Crowds at the Royal Ontario Museum’s heavily hyped Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition — Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World, which runs until January 3, 2010 — have far exceeded the museum’s own expectations. In the show’s first nine days, more than 18,000 people flocked to the museum’s spectacular new Daniel Libeskind-designed Michael Lee-Chin…
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Culture What do the Egg, the Swan and the Ant Have in Common?
Appraisals of Arne Jacobsen’s life and work rarely take his Jewish background into account. But the 50th anniversary this year of Copenhagen’s Royal Hotel, one of the Modernist architect’s landmark achievements, presents an opportunity to reconsider a towering figure of 20th-century design — and how wartime experiences may have colored Jacobsen’s work. A nonpracticing Jew,…
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Culture LABA and the Ripple Effect
As an eclectic roster of Jewish artists takes the stage at a new multimedia festival in early May, a bold new experiment aimed at transforming how Jewish communities connect with culture (and culture makers) will also enter the spotlight. From “absurdist rock cabaret” to giant sculptures to a “contact improvisation” workshop cheekily called “The Meating,”…
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News Study Kicks Off Gay Outreach Effort
Three-quarters of the rabbis who responded to an unprecedented new survey on diversity said they thought their congregations already do a “good to excellent” job of welcoming gay Jews. But for the gay Jewish advocacy group that undertook the survey, that’s precisely the problem. “Synagogues are resting on the assumption that ‘tolerance’ equals ‘welcoming,’ but…
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