Sharon Pomerantz
By Sharon Pomerantz
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Culture How My Bat Mitzvah Turned Me Off Judaism
This is the fifth in a series of essays examining Bar and Bat Mitzvahs in America. On March 25, 1978, the day after my bat mitzvah, I announced to my parents that I was done with Judaism and would never again set foot in a synagogue. Some of my disgust with Hebrew school was no…
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Culture How My Jewish Working Class Background Taught Me About Donald Trump
We live in a time of easy slogans and overly rigid categories. Since the election, countless pundits and friends have told me that I need to better understand white working class America. I’m now considered a member of the liberal media elite, or however you want to call someone who’s published a novel, earned a…
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49 Reasons Why 2016 Wasn't as Bad as You Think Jeremy Denk
For years I’ve been reading the essays and blog posts of MacArthur “genius” grant-winning pianist Jeremy Denk. Not since Leonard Bernstein has the music world had such a compelling explainer. Who else would compare a moment in the first movement of Beethoven’s Opus 31 No. 3 to a “Seinfeld” episode? Last March, I finally heard…
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Culture The Joy of Jewish Cookbooks
“I didn’t want this exhibit to be only of interest to Jews or foodies, but to everyone,” said Janice Bluestein Longone, collector of one of the most important archives of culinary literature in America. In the 1990s she was made adjunct curator of the collection after donating the archive to the University of Michigan in…
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Culture What ‘Girls’ Could Learn From the ‘Good Wife’s’ Wife
Two of my favorite television shows ran on Sunday nights this past winter — “The Good Wife” on CBS and “Girls” on HBO — and because I didn’t have time on Sundays, I tended to catch them on demand on Monday nights, back to back. On the surface, these shows don’t have much in common;…
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Opinion Requiem for the American Jewish Novel?
I may be one of the few writers who was not surprised this past November to read about Philip Roth’s retirement, nor was I inspired to sit shiva for the American Jewish novel. When our media announced the news (a month after being scooped by the French magazine Les Inrocks), a spate of commentary appeared…
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Culture Family History Seen Through Tenement Rooms
The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set On A Thousand Square Feet of The Lower East Side By Katharine Greider Public Affairs, 352 pages, $27 By the beginning of the 20th century, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was the most crowded neighborhood on earth, more densely populated than Calcutta. At the Tenement Museum on…
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