Rachel Zuckerman
By Rachel Zuckerman
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News Kabbalistic Kirtan: Just Replace Hindu With Hebrew
f you’ve ever been to a yoga class, you’ve probably performed kirtan, an ancient Hindu call-and-response chant practiced by Hindus and Sikhs. Now imagine that the phrases you were chanting were not Hindu, but Hebrew. Welcome to the newest rung in the Jewish spirituality ladder: kabbalistic kirtan. The genre — which features chanting Jewish names…
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Culture Adios, Spanish! Hebrew Gets Hot on Campus
Stephen Black wanted to study Hebrew in high school. But despite the sizable Jewish community in his New Jersey hometown, Black’s public school didn’t offer Hebrew classes, so he settled for Spanish instead. Then, last fall, when he enrolled as a freshman at Harvard University, Black had the chance at last to study Hebrew, and…
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News Veteran Artist Evokes Jewish Strength –– Overtly
Five years ago, veteran comic book artist Joe Kubert visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He expected to be moved, but since he and his parents had escaped from Poland before the Nazi genocide began, he assumed his emotional reaction would be relatively contained. Then, he saw something that struck him…
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News Straight Talk About Hair Getting to the Roots of Self-Loathing, Self-Confidence
Elissa Douchy is proud of her Sephardic roots — but not the ones attached to her hairline. She hates her curly hair enough to make a weekly trek to an unlicensed Dominican beauty salon in northern Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, where her hair is blow-dried straight. The procedure often takes two and a half hours,…
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News Chocolatey Goodness Studs Maternity Wear
After exhausting herself last year attaching nearly 400 handmade chocolate roses to a bustier, pastry chef Nicole Kaplan of the tony Eleven Madison Park restaurant decided to fashion an easier ensemble for this year’s sixth annual Chocolate Show at New York’s Manhattan Pavilion. With the help of a glue gun, she fastened hundreds of chocolate…
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News Work Begins on Ukraine Holocaust Memorial
DNEPROPETROVSK, Ukraine — On a frosty evening last week, 1,200 people gathered around an empty lot on Gogol Street in this former military-industrial city for what some observers said was a long-overdue dedication. Shivering Holocaust scholars, local businessmen and boldface names from Israeli politics and society — including Israeli Minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs…
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News Award-winning Yiddish Author Yehuda Elberg, 91, Dies in Montreal
Award-winning Yiddish author Yehuda Elberg died in his sleep in Montreal on October 18. He was 91. A widely acclaimed Yiddishist whose body of work documented shtetl life, he gained popularity in the English-speaking world after a 1997 English translation of two of his novels: “Ship of the Hunted” and “The Empire of Kalman the…
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News FLASH FRAMES
Nazis in Newark By Warren Grover Transaction Publishers, 380 pages, $49.95. * * *| Current Garden State antisemitism is one thing — see, for example, the works of New Jersey’s former poet laureate, Newark’s Amiri Baraka — but Nazis? In Newark? Warren Grover’s scholarly text bearing the provocative title “Nazis in Newark” is a history…
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