A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. As one unravels the history of the 20th century, it becomes apparent how deeply individual lives were woven into the larger fabric of world events. From the shtetls of Eastern Europe a new generation of Jewish youth emerged whose exploits shook the entire world. Now, after the…
Earlier this week, Molly Birnbaum wrote about her first writing teacher and the scent of Passover. Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: This past Sunday was Mother’s Day….
András Mezei (1930-2008) was a major Jewish-Hungarian poet who left behind a retrospective exploration of the Holocaust for our time. There are many voices speaking to us of terror, folly, greed, cruelty and absurdity, but Mezei’s poetry makes them sound like our own voices. His testimony has been published in England, in my translation, as…
On Monday, Molly Birnbaum wrote about her first writing teacher. Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: On the first night of Passover, my boyfriend and I attended a…
When the English novelist Ian McEwan accepted the Jerusalem Prize in January, he did so despite strident demands from pro-Palestinian writers to reject the prize and boycott the Jerusalem Book Fair where it is awarded. But McEwan insisted on his right to engage in dialogue with all Israelis, and argued in the Guardian that literature,…
Molly Birnbaum is the author of “Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: The first…
As a devoted fan of BBC period dramas and a rabid consumer of British literary culture, the period between January and May when PBS airs “Masterpiece” classic is my favorite TV season. Just last week PBS finished broadcasting the brand-new relaunch of the beloved series “Upstairs Downstairs.” The new series was basically a long pilot…
Last week, Deborah Lipstadt wrote about eerie anniversaries and Hannah Arendt. Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: This blog entry appears during the time that we mark Yom…
On Wednesday, Deborah Lipstadt wrote about eerie anniversaries. She is the author of the new book “The Eichmann Trial.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: I have spent…
It is often forgotten that before the existence of film noir, there was literary noir. The genre came to prominence in novels by James Cain, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who wrote “The Maltese Falcon” in 1930. Its origins can be found even further back, in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” from 1907. It is…
Meg Wolitzer writes in spaces where women’s emotions run high: She has tackled wives overshadowed by their husbands, as well as career woman who became stay-at-home moms. In her new novel, “The Uncoupling” (Riverhead), she investigates sex by creating characters who stop having it altogether when a spell enchants their suburb. The magic begins —…
דאָס ביכל נעמט אַרײַן אַ גלאָסאַר, שמועס־פֿראַגעס און קלאַנג־רעקאָרדירונגען פֿון די דערציילונגען.
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