Raphael Magarik
By Raphael Magarik
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Culture Could This Be The Future of the Jewish (Meta) Novel?
The Book of Numbers By Joshua Cohen Random House, 592 pages, $28 ‘This will kill that.” As the medieval archdeacon Claude Frollo in Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” speaks this prophecy of obsolescence, he points to a printed book and then a cathedral. Mass literacy, Hugo implies, eroded authoritarian Catholicism and replaced massive,…
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Opinion The Bitter Irony of Leon Wieseltier’s Outrage at Michael Oren
Though I have long admired Leon Wieseltier’s gift for irony, I had not appreciated the sacrifices he makes for his art. I had not dreamed that, in the service of comic inversion, the former literary editor of The New Republic was prepared not only to skewer contradictions but, when they were in short supply, to…
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Culture Is This Man a Prophet or a Provocateur?
Catch the Jew! By Tuvia Tenenbom Gefen Publishing House, 484 pages, $24.95 Liberal Jews chagrined at the recent elections in Israel probably should read Tuvia Tenenbom’s “Catch the Jew.” Tenenbom’s book, in which he narrates his travels and conversations in Israel and the West Bank, will not provide comfort. In fact, he holds leftist Jews…
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Opinion Why I’m (Reluctantly) Voting Against BDS at Berkeley
Pro-Palestinian demonstrator argues with pro-Israeli demonstrator at UC Berkeley / Getty Images On Thursday, my union as a graduate student at Berkeley, UAW 2865, is going to vote on a BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) resolution against Israel. I’m going to vote “no,” although I oppose the occupation and support selective, non-BDS branded boycotts targeting the…
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Opinion Do Jewish Actions Ever Cause Anti-Semitism?
Jewish graves daubed with anti-Semitic slogans in a German cemetery / Getty Images Is anti-Semitism ever a response to things that Jews do? Jeffrey Goldberg thinks saying “Jews… Jewish organizations, or the Jewish state” ever cause anti-Semitism amounts to blaming the victim. Thus he attacked Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, for…
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Opinion Why Israeli Left Should Stop Backing Gaza Wars
Palestinians carry a boy following an Israeli military strike on the Gaza beach / Getty Images In the current outburst of violence, perhaps the only pliable and docile actor is Israel’s center-left. Politically speaking, opposition leader Isaac Herzog might as well be cowering in a shelter. He toes Prime Minister Netanyahu’s line, supporting both the…
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Culture How Liturgy Can Co-Exist With Backstreet Boys and The Wu-Tang Clan
I doubt many of the attendees at Kehilat Hadar’s Upper West Side Yom Kippur services, at which the “Lamedvavnik Niggun” made its debut liturgical appearance last fall, knew the story behind the tune. I do, because I cooked it up with Aryeh Bernstein, who leads high holiday services at Hadar. We borrowed the melody from…
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Culture A Holocaust Romance Tied to a Necklace, Filled With Clichés
Love and Treasure By Ayelet Waldman Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95 A historical novel, the Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács argued, should reach only as far backwards as the era of the author’s grandparents. That is because novelists build not balanced panoramas, but rather individual portraits. Real human beings are unrealistic, because they are improbably idiosyncratic….
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