Michael Chabon Is ‘Over the Moon’
The JTA has a great story fleshing out the recent news that the Coen brothers will be making a movie based on Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”
“Naturally, I am over the moon about this,” Chabon wrote in an e-mail to JTA. “They are heroes of mine.”
All in all, it has been a pretty great week for Chabon. Barack Obama has been winning big in contest after contest — and Chabon seems more than a little over the moon about him.
Writing in The Washington Post a few weeks ago, Chabon described his preferred candidate in almost Christ-like terms:
To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant. We must allow ourselves to believe in Obama, not blindly or unquestioningly as we might believe in some demagogue or figurehead but as we believe in the comfort we take in our families, in the pleasure of good company, in the blessings of peace and liberty, in any thing that requires us to put our trust in the best part of ourselves and others. That kind of belief is a revolutionary act. It holds the power, in time, to overturn and repair all the damage that our fear has driven us to inflict on ourselves and the world.
Why I became the Forward’s editor-in-chief
You are surely a friend of the Forward if you’re reading this. And so it’s with excitement and awe — of all that the Forward is, was, and will be — that I introduce myself to you as the Forward’s newest editor-in-chief.
And what a time to step into the leadership of this storied Jewish institution! For 129 years, the Forward has shaped and told the American Jewish story. I’m stepping in at an intense time for Jews the world over. We urgently need the Forward’s courageous, unflinching journalism — not only as a source of reliable information, but to provide inspiration, healing and hope.
, editor-in-chief