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A Legendary Encounter
Who was Arnold Schoenberg? In his new and indispensable book, “A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life” (Yale University Press), musicologist Joseph Auner reminds us that Schoenberg has been viewed as a revolutionary modernist, an evolutionary traditionalist, a “reactionary Romantic,” a solitary prophet, the founder of a school that has held composition in its clutches…
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Demographics Drive Likud’s Shifting Agenda
WASHINGTON — Driving the Likud’s metamorphosis from “Greater Israel” dogmatism to separation pragmatism are not constraints of geography but of demography. “Above all hovers the cloud of demographics,” Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea of Yediot Aharonot last week, explaining his dramatic decision to come out in favor of unilateral Israeli…
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A Chicano Writer Seeks Truth in Other Communities
The Nature of Truth: A Novel By Sergio Troncoso Northwestern University, 262 pages, $22.95. * * *| In “Fresh Challah,” an essay published in Hadassah Magazine in 1999, Sergio Troncoso described sitting in an Upper West Side cafe on Erev Yom Kippur devouring fresh rugelach, luscious fortification for the next day’s fast. Though not Jewish,…
The Latest
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Crisis Looms Over Settlement Evacuations
JERUSALEM — The debate over the future Israel’s settlement policy continued to rage furiously this week, following Prime Minister Sharon’s December 18 speech outlining possible unilateral steps to separate from the Palestinians and redeploy some settlements. While the Labor Party and the left continued to dismiss Sharon’s plan as either insincere or a veiled form…
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A Polymath Adds to His Profile
Leon Botstein doesn’t look the part of a jet-setting international orchestra conductor. Dressed in a baggy black suit for an appearance last month at the helm of his American Symphony Orchestra, the bespectacled, balding 55-year-old seemed more like a frumpy professor than someone whose resume includes guest stints with important orchestras on three continents. In…
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LOST IN TRANSITION
Judith Brodsky has never been shy about tackling controversial issues. The printmaker has used her art to decry the environmentally corrosive effects of industrialization in New Jersey and to examine the struggle for gender equality in the curatorial profession. In “Memoir of an Assimilated Family,” on display at the Aljira arts center, Brodsky looks inward,…
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What’s in a Name? If it’s ‘Grubman,’ A Whole Identity
Swagbelly By D.J. Levien Plume, 240 pages, $13. * * *| Elliott Grubman, the protagonist in screenwriter D.J. Levien’s new novel, is a man split down the middle, and it’s all there in his oxymoronic name. Look at that prissy “Elliott,” a name — like Howard — that brands many post-Holocaust American Jewish men with…
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Bush Commits Parapraxis
I don’t know if anyone else caught it, but George W. Bush made what was obviously a Freudian slip in his initial appearance last week after the capture of Saddam Hussein. Gazing determinedly into the television cameras, he declared, “I have a message for the American people: You will not have to fear the rule…
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Jerusalem Returns to Normal: That Is, Chaos, Paralysis and Strikes Abound
JERUSALEM — Things were briefly back to normal in government offices last week, and that meant chaos. For the last three months, a rolling series of work stoppages, slowdowns and outright strikes have brought Israel’s infamous government bureaucracy to a virtual standstill. The result has been a nightmare for those needing anything from a driver’s…
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A Literary Legend Spares Nothing in His Latest Memoir
First Loves: A Memoir By Ted Solotaroff Seven Stories Press, 299 pages, $24.95. * * *| Memoir demands the writer be committed to the truth about himself and the truth about others and, though all are ego-driven, the best reflect not merely the author’s life but the world that endowed that life. In his 1998…
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After Rebuke, Bush Officials Voice Support For Israel Plan Israeli Sends Signal to Iran Over Airwaves — In Persian
When Israel’s defense minister chatted on-air with radio listeners last week about the possibility of a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, he did more than just send a warning to the leaders in Tehran. He also shed light on one of the strangest media phenomena in the Middle East: the Farsi-language program of Israel…
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