Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon’s latest novel “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” set in an imagined Jewish homeland in Alaska, has drawn critical raves. But it also elicited a widely discussed New York Post item provocatively titled, “NOVELIST’S UGLY VIEW OF JEWS.” Barbs flung by the wildly sensationalistic Post are easy to laugh off, and Chabon…
Wondering what the book’s about? Fortunately, there’s this informative back-cover testimonial from Stanford literature professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Reading the texts of a culture that could only achieve its Germanness by being so utterly Jewish, along the lines of the 20th-century’s terminal mass migrations, Todd Presner’s book opens our 21st-century eyes to a new way…
As I watched the bonus outtakes on the DVD version of Sacha Baron Cohen’s box-office hit, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” I realized that while the Borat routine might get old in the temporal sense, it somehow never stops being funny. That’s why I was excited to read…
Sholom Aleichem, Bintel Blog readers. (Your turn: Aleichem, Sholom). I’m currently on tour promoting “A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward”, so my posting will be spotty for a little while. But here’s something that could keep you busy for some time. In the latest issue of The Nation,…
In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I’m personally indebted to Yale Strom. I keep a hardcover copy of his reference work “The Book of Klezmer: The History, the Music, the Folklore” (Chicago Review Press, 2002) on the bookshelf that rings the ceiling in my apartment. Whenever I need to check a…
The Internet contains scores of Hasidic-dominated Yiddish sites, including chat rooms, blogs, bulletin boards and a separate version of Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia. Reading one of the Yiddish bulletin boards, I came across the following dismissive comments of an anonymous critic: “Give a look and you’ll see that nowadays all [ultra-Orthodox] Yiddish newspapers and…
Last month’s publication of “The Cross and Other Jewish Stories” by Ukrainian-born Yiddish author Lamed Shapiro marks both a new beginning and the beginning of the end for the New Yiddish Library Series. “The Cross” is the seventh book of the series, a collaborative effort involving the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, the…
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