David Forman’s newest book is an old one. Rich with tales of giants, the Tudor court and highwaymen besieging a humble Jewish village, “The Clever Little Tailor” is the first English translation and bilingual edition of Yiddish writer Solomon Simon’s 1933 collection of stories about Shnayderl the tailor. The book is noteworthy for having the…
Sarah Schulman had already been covering AIDS as a journalist for five years when she attended a 1987 demonstration organized by the newly-formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as ACT UP. ACT UP members picketed outside New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for 72 hours in protest of the sluggish pace…
Haviva Ner-David was just starting to promote her debut novel, about the intersecting lives of two Israeli women — one Jewish, one Palestinian — when last month’s military escalation with Gaza erupted, accompanied by the worst internecine fighting between Jewish and Arab citizens in recent memory. Ner David, a rabbi, writer, and mother of seven,…
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — For most New Yorkers, the early days of COVID-19 were synonymous with eerily empty streets, the constant wail of sirens, and the clapping and cheering for health care workers. But what was it really like for the doctors and other health care professionals who found themselves…
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood is known as a center of gentrification and a gathering place for the cool young hipsters of New York City. A short walk from the Lower East Side over the Williamsburg Bridge, it’s also home to one of the most concentrated Hasidic Jewish communities in…
The ten students in my Yiddish class are of differing political persuasions but we're united in our love of the language.
After working from home for over a year, I still have no idea how Zoom backgrounds work, which means the various strangers I interview can look past me to see my ailing succulents, unopened prestige cookbooks and a childhood’s worth of participation trophies. Unlike me, a supposed “digital native,” Martin Cooper is old enough that…
On a recent segment of “The Today Show,” a cadre of well-coiffed hosts discussed the life of Eddie Jaku, a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor and the author of “The Happiest Man on Earth,” a memoir about his imprisonment in Auschwitz. Grainy photos of concentration camp prisoners alternated with clips from an interview with Jaku and videos…
Antiquities By Cynthia Ozick Knopf, 192 pages, $21.00 Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town” proposes a remarkable idea: That after death, we get to re-experience a single day from our lives — just one perfectly ordinary day. It’s a painful, startling scenario, a striking conclusion to a complicated existence. “I can’t look at everything hard…
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro asked me to meet him on Frieda Zames Way, which is not an easy place to find on Google Maps. No street view photos, no subway wait times — nothing to feed our iPhone-era inclination to know exactly where we’re going, all the time. As any serious investigative journalist would, I immediately turned…
The publisher W.W. Norton has pulled its recently-released biography of Philip Roth from print after multiple women accused its author, Blake Bailey, of sexual assault. The Associated Press reported that Norton would stop printing of “Philip Roth: The Biography,” a much hyped, 912-page treatise on the author’s life, as well as Bailey’s 2014 memoir “The…
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