These are busy times for Sander Gilman, a scholar who has long studied Western cultural constructions of health and disease. Though American life expectancy is at an all-time high, our public discourse seems more crowded than ever by anxieties about our physical well-being. New Yorkers and Californians have stopped smoking in bars, 40% of Americans…
Only a few years ago Iran appeared to be on the cusp of fundamental democratic transformation. The 1997 landslide victory of President Mohammad Khatami had ushered in an era of expanding social freedoms and increasingly open political debate. Then, in 2000, a coalition of reformist parties won a working majority in parliamentary elections, promising to…
Marvin Friedman writes from San Francisco: Your recent column about the expression folg mir a gang reminded me of how my mother used to say, in a tone between contempt and sarcasm, “Oykh mir a mentsh,” which I understood to mean something like, “This is also considered a person?” In turn, this brought me to…
Now that Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is actually playing in theaters (it opened Wednesday), Americans have the luxury of seeing the film before arguing about it. Perhaps the harshest newspaper review so far of the cinematic depiction of the final 12 hours of Jesus’ life came from Jami Bernard in the New…
Once again, Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan has proven his genius as a master of what George Orwell called “doublethink.” In one simple sentence, he can predict opposite outcomes and speak the truth at the same time. As our modern Delphic oracle, he might produce a weather forecast in which he says, “It will…
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is set to open in Brazil early next month — and Rabbi Henry Sobel is worried. Sobel, the religious leader of Brazil’s Congregacao Israelita Paulista, the largest synagogue in Latin America, fears that the film about Jesus’ death will inflame antisemitism in his country, where 95% of the…
Five Men Who Broke My Heart: A Memoir By Susan Shapiro Delacorte Press, 240 pages, $21.95. * * *| When journalists who have spent years telling other people’s stories turn the literary lens on their own lives, something interesting is bound to happen. In 1996, NPR commentator Marion Winik, at 37, walked a terra firma…
Quebec Nixes Speaker A civil servant in the Quebec government has been blocked from participating in a lecture series on Montreal Jewry, after his supervisors discovered that it includes a discussion of fascism and antisemitism in Quebec during the 1930s, according to one organizer of the program. The series on Montreal Jewry, to be held…
When news spread that Akiba Hebrew Academy had hired Joe Bryant, a number of alums began scratching their heads, trying to figure out why a former Philadelphia 76er would take a job coaching the Akiba girls’ basketball team. As it turns out, Bryant had just returned from a successful post-NBA career playing in Italy, and…
Harry Louis Selden, a newspaperman at the forefront of the rescue of European Jews during the Holocaust, died February 14 in Rockville, Md., after a short illness. He was 96. A reporter for the Long Island Daily Press and an associate editor at Newsweek during the early 1930s, Selden came to support the establishment of…
Three years ago, I rarely acknowledged Shabbat. I was working hellish hours during the week on a truly horrid, excessively perky daytime talk show. The low point was when I was asked to write a transition from a story about AIDS in Africa to a segment about a fashion show for dogs. After the show,…
