Nick Frisch
By Nick Frisch
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Culture Sha Boli, China’s Jewish Translator, Writer and Movie Actor
On a muggy day last year, I biked through Beijing’s gray-brick hutong, backstreet alleyways, beneath a smoggy sky. My front basket ferried a batch of fresh bagels bought from an entrepreneurial expatriate New Yorker. A nosh is the usual price of entry for a chat with Sidney Shapiro, one of Chinese literature’s pre-eminent translators into…
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Culture Wild Grass Grows High
Last Christmas, a group of very lapsed Jews gathered around a table of very treyf *Chinese food — in China, for good measure. Eventually, someone remembered that it was the fifth night of Hanukkah, too. Soon, a low-rent menorah punched out of sheet metal was produced from a battered Chabad box, and candles were lit….
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Culture Kosher Chinese: Jewish and Asian Currents Find Harmony in Opera
Presiding over a table stuffed with every imaginable Chinese delicacy, Stewart Wallace appeared very much the Jew at ease: cracking jokes, expertly wielding chopsticks and savoring every bite, his curly hair bobbing about. But this was a Saturday night ritual with a difference: Wallace’s dining companions were mostly Chinese musicians, the main language was Mandarin…
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Culture Schnorientalism: The Tao of Jews
As even the most tenuous speaker of Chinese can tell you, travels in that country mean having the same Inevitable Conversation over and over. And over. “Oh!” the locals will pretend to swoon. “Your Chinese is excellent!” “No, no,” comes your polite or honest reply. “It’s really nothing.” “Where are you from?” “What is your…
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