Steven J. Zipperstein
By Steven J. Zipperstein
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Culture Philip Roth’s Forgotten Tape: The Beginnings of The Great American Writer
I last spoke with Philip about a week before his death. A few days earlier, I had emailed him the tape that I discovered of the 1962 Yeshiva University symposium that he’d remember always as a crucial turning point — one, in equal measure, dreadful and indispensable. It was just the sort of experience that,…
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Opinion Israel Professor Gets in Big Trouble for Showing Concern for Gaza War Victims
Hanoch Sheinman, the philosophy professor at Bar-Ilan University’s law school caught in the midst of a fierce controversy involving an email sent to his second-year law students, expressing sympathy for all victims of Israel’s Gaza conflict, phoned me in frustration because he couldn’t manage to shut the roof of his rented convertible. I had emailed…
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Opinion Benjamin Netanyahu’s Favorite Poet — and Ours
First at the November 2012 memorial ceremony for the victims of the Toulouse school massacre, and again in response to news of the three murdered Israeli teenagers earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaned on the same line of the same poem “On the Slaughter” by Hayyim Nahman Bialik: “The vengeance for a…
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Opinion Warts and All, Protests Was Israel at its Best
Shortly before landing in Tel Aviv in late August, the person in the airplane seat next to mine, a young, smart Israeli just awarded an Oxford post-doc, told me he was no longer convinced that Israel would last for more than another 50 or 60 years. By no means did he seem morbid: He had…
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News Scars Without End
In “Nemesis,” much like elsewhere in that astonishing canvas that is Philip Roth’s work, community is something that no credible human being can live with and whose absence tears, scars without end. It seems not insignificant that the greatest of all living novelists to explore the inescapability of aloneness is born of a people that…
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Culture Anatomy of a Jewish Literary Prize
Nearly every year, on that day in April when the Koret Jewish Book Awards were to take place at the wood-paneled, hushed environs of New York’s Harvard Club, I’d awake and ask myself, testily, why I had insisted we return to that same stuffy midtown pile. The location was convenient for publishers, book editors and…
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News Go, Go and Live!
Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland Before the Holocaust Edited by Jeffrey Shandler Yale, 437 pages, $35. * * *| Recently I visited a new synagogue in the overwhelmingly Orthodox Long Island suburb of Woodmere. In its entrance hall is a wall mural depicting East European Jewish life on the verge of Nazi…
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