Zackary Sholem Berger is a frequent contributor to the Forward and the Yiddish Forward. He lives in Baltimore.
Zackary Sholem Berger
By Zackary Sholem Berger
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News A Tale of Two Hospitals
Fancy Private Hospital is conveniently located in Upper Manhattan, a few blocks away from a subway stop. If you like, though, you can stroll to the main building along Madison Avenue, perhaps stopping at some of the boutiques you’ll find along the way. A few other students and I took such a relaxed trip to…
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News Has Anyone Seen a Wedding Ring?
In between patients, each room in the hospital has a life of its own: The operating theater is prepped for another run; the delivery room is ready for another baby to come down the pike. Everything’s sterilized and rearranged. While the attendants and residents wolf down their cheeseburgers, a medical student (that’s me) retreats to…
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News Bringing Up Baby –– and Doctor
Even God needs help when making miracles. He sent a wind to split the Red Sea rather than doing it directly; Moses took intensive elocution lessons before he could shout the Ten Commandments down to the Israelites, and the walls of Jericho could well have been jerry-built by history’s first unscrupulous contractors. Add to this…
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Culture Ladies and Gentlemen, The Once and Future Yiddish Language
Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish By Dovid Katz Basic Books, 430 pages, $26.95. ——— Given the sentimentality of much recent writing on the subject, American Jews might be forgiven for believing that no one with a critical eye, or without sepia-colored glasses, possibly could write an entire book about Yiddish — much…
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Israel News Man Who Saved a Million Books Writes One of His Own
Aaron Lansky has spent his 20s, 30s and 40s saving Yiddish books. Now, at 49, he’s written a book of his own. Chockfull of his adventures saving great works of literature from Dumpsters, clueless grandchildren, collapsing buildings and widespread ignorance, “Outwitting History: How One Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved a Civilization” relates stories…
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Culture Letting Loose the Golem on Society’s Dilemmas
It’s rare to come upon a book with a truly original idea — which makes it all the more important that the idea be clearly and convincingly argued. Take this book about the golem — not just Rabbi Loew’s famous clay warrior of Prague, but any created being, somewhere between human and inanimate, brought into…
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Culture Golems and Spies: Today’s Two Yiddish Literatures
Today there are two different Yiddish literatures: one secular and one chasidic. Despite the differences in their audiences, they share a language, a cultural-religious heritage and a status of almost complete obscurity to most American Jews. Boris Sandler, by virtue of his position as editor of the Yiddish Forward, has been the gatekeeper for what…
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Culture Crisscross: Boyarin on Borders
Intersections only exist once streets have been mapped, but they tell us where one street ends and the next begins. As a scholar not just of the Talmud, but also of the cultural foundations of early rabbinic Judaism and the rhetoric of writers of antiquity, Daniel Boyarin has engaged in tracing the intersection between Jewish…
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