The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage Edited by Loolwa Khazzoom Seal Press, 256 pages, $16.95. * * *| ‘Today,” writes Loolwa Khazzoom in the introduction to her new book of essays by Sephardic and Mizrahi women, “North African and Middle Eastern Jewish women continue to…
As Israel’s 56th Independence Day approaches, stock-taking easily produces negatives. Continuing suicide bombs, unbridled hatred of Israel and Jews throughout much of the Arab world, international condemnation of the Jewish state, and unresolved economic and social issues do not make for a gala celebration. This year, while we give thanks for the existence of the…
The Jewish Book of Fables By Eliezer Shtaynbarg Edited and translated from the Yiddish by Curt Leviant Syracuse University Press, 256 pages, $34.95. * * *| Eliezer Shtaynbarg (1880-1932) taught children Yiddish and Hebrew and wrote and directed plays for them in his native Bessarabia. Learned in biblical and Talmudic literature, he also edited a…
WASHINGTON — After two months on the air, Alhurra, America’s Arabic satellite TV network, has become a favorite punching bag of Arab commentators and religious leaders throughout the Middle East. Cartoonists ridicule it. Columnists dismiss it. One Saudi cleric went so far as to issue an Islamic edict outlawing Muslims from watching the network or…
The Outside World By Tova Mirvis Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $24. * * *| ‘Tzippy Goldman was a good girl,” but she was trapped: She wanted to scream, to throw a fit, to escape the confines of Brooklyn and shidduch dating and, most of all, her wedding-obsessed mother. As Tova Mirvis’s new novel opens,…
Since August of 1967, when the body of an executive at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was found floating in the Vltava river, a fog of international intrigue has surrounded the death. Now, a Czech historian and documentary filmmaker, Martin Smok, has come upon new leads in the case suggesting that the executive, Charles…
Feathers By Haim Be’er Translated by Hillel Halkin Brandeis University Press, 272 pages, $26. * * *| The Pure Element of Time By Haim Be’er Translated by Barbara Harshav Brandeis, 282 pages, $26. * * *| What are the common elements of memory and art? How is remembrance, with its duty to veracity, fashioned into…
A 25-year-old Jewish philanthropist has launched one of the nation’s most generous student writing contests with a whopping grand prize of $25,000, in the hopes of altering Christian-Jewish relations following the recent debate surrounding Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of the Christ.” Introduced last week in full-page advertisements in many national newspapers — including The…
Yosi Gordon writes from St. Paul, Minn.: That most adorable of insects, the ladybird or ladybug, is in Hebrew parat Moshe rabbenu, ‘Moses’ cow.’ A myth or legend must be lurking behind that name, but I have been unable to find it. Can you help? Indeed I can. It is not only Mr. Gordon who…
BERKELEY, Calif. — If the Republican National Committee issued an FBI-style “most wanted” list, liberal activist Wes Boyd would probably rank near the top. The GOP has been trying to shut down one of Boyd’s projects, the MoveOn.org Voter Fund — the soft-money arm of the Internet-based advocacy group that Boyd founded in 1998 with…
‘I don’t believe there is any Jewish writer writing today, whatever the age, who is not somehow consciously or unconsciously affected by the Holocaust,” said novelist and human rights activist Moris Farhi. “I don’t think any enlightened European writer can escape the effects of the Holocaust.” Indeed, phantoms haunt Farhi, one of today’s foremost chroniclers…
