Getty Images As Team USA carries the hopes of the English-speaking world in Brazil, inquiring minds are wondering why England is so perennially terrible at the sport it invented (and let’s not get started on cricket). It is a question that was surprisingly well answered in 2009, along with the corollary question about how America…
There are two Jonathan Wilsons writing about soccer in a knowledgeable way. One is Jonathan Wilson from the Guardian, arguably the foremost journalistic expert on tactics in the modern game, the other is Jonathan Wilson, the Tufts University Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, who covered the 1994 World Cup for The New Yorker and…
British Jews have never accounted for more than 1% of the population. And their contribution to soccer has always been obscured. But, in his well-researched and compellingly-written history, “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?: The History of Football’s Forgotten Tribe,” Anthony Clavane explains the outsize contribution of British Jews to British soccer and their pivotal…
Getty Images Thinkers from Cass Sunstein to Eli Pariser in “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You,” have elucidated the threat to social discourse posed by the Internet. Increasingly able to insulate ourselves from disagreement, we live in bubbles of like-mindedness. From whichever angle, it’s epistemic closure in sociological jargon, “bullshit mountain”…
Image courtesy Abraham Klein Israel has reached the World Cup finals just once — Mexico 1970 — where, after losing to Uruguay and tying with Sweden and Italy, it failed to progress beyond the group stage. That year in Mexico, though, there was an outstanding Israeli success — referee Abraham Klein. An unlikely figure to…
Photo: Chloe Aftel Call it a boy-meets-girl-who-thinks-boy-was-born-a-girl story. In “Adam,” the debut novel from cult graphic memoirist Ariel Schrag, an awkward California teenager named Adam Freedman parachutes into an alien landscape of subcultures and identities when he joins his lesbian sister in Brooklyn for the summer. (Full disclosure: Schrag was featured in “Graphic Details: Confessional…
Photo: David Franco A decade after its publication, Canadian author David Bezmozgis is turning his debut short story collection, “Natasha and Other Stories,” into a film. As with “Victoria Day,” his first cinematic endeavor in 2009, Bezmozgis, a graduate of the University of Southern California’s film school, is both writing and directing the project. The…
When she was 17 years old, Leah Vincent, a young Orthodox woman from Pittsburgh, found herself living alone in a tiny basement apartment in Brooklyn. She was estranged from her parents and 10 siblings, socially isolated, and living on a low-wage diet of grilled cheese sandwiches and ketchup. Desperate for company, she sought the friendship…
● A Basket of Apples By Shirley Faessler Now And Then Books, 184 pages, $18.95 Nobel laureate Alice Munro called Shirley Faessler, whom she knew personally, “a witty and uncompromising writer.” Readers of Faessler’s recently reissued collection of short stories, “A Basket of Apples,” will undoubtedly agree. Originally published in 1988 and long out of…
A chronicle of Nazi persecution of gay people, a study of Jews and obscenity, and a haunting artistic collaboration are among the wide-ranging winners of this year’s Canadian Jewish Book Awards. After an announcement last week, the awards will be presented at a May 27 ceremony in Toronto. With its other accolades for a Holocaust…
Israel is known for all kinds of things — a burgeoning local food scene, TV series like “Homeland” and “In Treatment,” and high tech companies like Waze. Now, with the launch of Granta Israel, a Hebrew edition of the prestigious magazine started by Cambridge University students in 1889, Israel is officially an international literary powerhouse….
100% of profits support our journalism
