Shoshana Olidort
By Shoshana Olidort
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The Schmooze Putting Together Yiddish Poetry, Piece by Piece
If Yiddish songs were popular in your childhood home, then the recently released new edition of “Pearls of Yiddish Poetry” may help put forgotten pieces of your auditory past back together. Many of us remember fragments of songs that we heard as children, songs that come back to us while doing the laundry, or scrubbing…
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The Schmooze A Disappointing Dybbuk
It’s a pretty familiar theme — the Jew as a perpetual wanderer, forever a foreigner, friendless and reviled by all. Is there anyone else so existentially homeless, utterly without place on the planet as the Jew? Who, besides the Jew, is so intolerable to his host that he becomes the target of violent threats, which…
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The Schmooze Mourning and Madness in the Warsaw Ghetto
The year is 1943. The place is Warsaw. The ghetto uprising has been crushed, but one man, a Hasid by the name of Yosl Rakover, is still alive, and he is busy recording his sordid tale for posterity. After recounting the events of the last few years — the deaths of his children and grandchildren,…
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Books YIVO Encyclopedia Launches Online Edition
Geese were a staple of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and Jewish women knew how to get the most out of their fowl of choice. The feathers were sold as quills for writing and stuffing for bedding, fat used as an alternative to butter or the Jewish version of lard, and the birds themselves were…
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Culture Playing it Safe
The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: and Other Stories By Joseph Epstein Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 272 pages, $24 This compact collection of short stories, almost all of them set in Chicago, is about Jewish men of a certain age who have been playing it safe for all of their mostly passionless though not unsuccessful…
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The Schmooze Jewish Superhero, Protecting the Weak
Chaim Lazaros is a real-life superhero. Several nights a week he transforms into an alterego named Life. Donning a black domino mask, fedora and skinny tie, he stuffs a backpack full of drinks and snacks, and patrols the streets of New York City while distributing the life-saving goods to the homeless. Life, 25, is one…
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The Schmooze Brightly Lit: Illuminated Traveling Texts
For centuries, the people of the book have also been a people perpetually on the move. Always, Jews took their books with them, writing and reading as they traveled. And, despite widespread assumptions about Judaism’s historically ambiguous relationship vis-à-vis painting and drawing, many of these books — manuscripts and printed works alike — were lavishly…
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Books A 21st-Century Schlemiel
The Ask By Sam Lipsyte Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $25 He is the anti-hero of the American Jewish novel: bright, only not bright enough; more dreamy than driven, and possessed by insatiable, often misappropriated desires. He does not see himself as beholden to his Jewishness, but neither can he escape it. He was…
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