Even before Manhattan’s West Side piers opened to the public for the 2004 Armory show, a piece by Israeli-born video artist Michal Rovner had already sold for $90,000: a long white steel laboratory table appointed with Petrie dishes, within which quivering DNA-like forms suggest images seen under a microscope. In fact, the images are video…
Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition By Steven Greenberg University of Wisconsin Press, 264 pages, $35. * * *| Queer Theory and the Jewish Question Edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pellegrini Columbia University Press, 464 pages, $24.50 * * *| Imagine learning that, because of how you were…
Still Life with Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terrorism By David Horovitz Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages, $25. * * *| In the three and a half years since the second intifada was launched, the voice of the mainstream Israeli public has rarely been heard internationally. Television largely seeks out the extremists; terror victims’…
The Slovenes of Slovenia, the northwest corner of the former Yugoslavia, have, according to an April 17 New York Times article, a problem — which is why they’re about to change their flag. People confuse them with the Slovaks of Slovakia, the eastern half of the former Czechoslovakia, who have a similar flag. And if…
A leading U.S. Holocaust-denial group’s advertisements were pulled from a liberal weekly, The Nation, after protests from editorial staffers and Jewish organizations. The May 3 issue of the magazine featured a promotional ad for the book “The Founding Myths of Modern Israel.” The ad claimed that the book dissects historical myths used to justify Zionist…
Move over Madonna, there’s a new music video star in the house. The opera house, that is. Millennial Arts Productions’ Eléazar: Portrait of a Tenor and a Role” follows tenor Neil Shicoff as he performs Fromental Halevy’s “La Juive” in Vienna and shoots a music video of the opera’s “Rachel” aria with academy-award-winning director Sidney…
This weekend, much of Central and Eastern Europe will be celebrating as my country of Latvia and nine other new member-states officially join the European Union. Last month, five of those states — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia — also joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. For many in Central and Eastern Europe, membership…
Two years ago, I did a column on what it was like to have a porkola meatball baby. Family members hissed that I nursed her too often; strangers squeezed her thighs and raised their eyebrows; one reader sent an impassioned letter pleading with me to stick a pacifier in the kid’s mouth, because if I…
WASHINGTON — As sirens wailed in Israel on Sunday, marking the day on which Israelis commemorate the 20,196 soldiers and civilians who died in hostilities since the Jewish state was born, American Jewish war veterans gathered in Arlington National Cemetery to mark the 60th anniversary of the death of Major General Orde Wingate, the spiritual…
When Jews strike the breast for each item in the comprehensive list of human sins it is a communal confession; it was of the nation that holiness was required. I ask leave to think personally and tell an anecdote I’ve told before. In the bitterly cold winter of 1938 I sat in the vast glass-and-iron…
WASHINGTON — Israeli leaders fear that increasing international efforts to link Iraq’s troubles with Israel’s will lead to American pressure on Jerusalem for concessions. Fueling these fears is the Bush administration’s determination to stand by the United Nations special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, even after he partially blamed American support of Israeli policies for…
