Sarah Kessler
By Sarah Kessler
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Culture Our Crowd
In Dori Carter’s luxurious and leafy Southern California town of Rancho Esperanza, the setting for her second book, everyone knows the neighbor’s social status, but nobody knows each other — or, it seems, themselves. “We Are Rich” (Other Press) is, at once, a novel and collection of short stories — 12 chapters and 12 first-person…
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Culture Describing a Scribe
On an immediate level, illustrator Arthur Szyk’s (1894–1951) “The Scribe,” painted during his late twenties in Paris, is a confident display of technical mastery. Here’s a young artist who can do ornate, Renaissance illuminations; he can also give you Picasso’s abstraction. Actually, he can give you both at once. This painting, as it turns out,…
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Culture A Utopian Bronx Tale
In the mid-1920s, a group of immigrant Jewish factory workers decided that they’d come this far for something better than the slums they inhabited. So pooling resources, they orchestrated the construction of four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx, with practical goals for a better quality of life, and idealistic visions of…
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Life Steve Reich’s Pulitzer-Winning ‘Double Sextet’
“Ehmor m’aht, v’ahsay harbay — Say little and do much,” the fourth movement from composer Steve Reich’s “You Are (Variations)” 2004 ensemble piece is a pithy explanation of the style that first brought him attention, Grammy Awards in 1990 and 1999, and, this week, the 2009 Pulitzer prize for music. His innovative use of dialogue…
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Life Jerusalem Gets the PBS Treatment
As the site of — depending on how one worships — Abraham’s divinely-commanded sacrifice (and last minute recall) of his son, Jesus’s resurrection from the dead and Mohammed’s ascension to heaven, Jerusalem is no longer the “militarily and strategically” insignificant spot 35 miles off the coast of Mediterranean, that it was 40 centuries ago, according…
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Israel News The Sky’s the Limit: Celebrating El Al
‘And on the 2,083,785th day El Al was created,” proclaims an old color ad for the Israeli airline, divine light breaking across the runway as a plane touches down into the Holy Land. Whether it was a last-minute act of divine creation in 5707 or an act of political expediency in 1948, the “Airline of…
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Culture Celebrated Collection of Hebrew Texts on View, on Sale
Jack Lunzer, whose private collection of more than 11,000 Hebrew books and manuscripts is on display at the New York auction house Sotheby’s until February 19, has a line he often repeats: “When two or three Jews get together, they buy a printing press.” The Valmadonna Trust Library, which is valued at more than $40…
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Culture Martin Munkacsi: The Prodigal Archives
To see him roaming the halls of Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1960s, poor and desperate for commissions, it must have been hard to believe that only a few decades earlier, Martin Munkacsi was one of the world’s highest-paid photographers. During a 2007 retrospective of his work, shown in New York at the International Center…
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