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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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There Was a Chasid Who Had a Farm
With interest in environmental sustainability burgeoning, organic farmers are finding more and more buyers — with kosher-keeping consumers among them. It’s all possible thanks in part to a growing number of chasidic Jews who are swapping their black coats for overalls, citing the Torah and a Jewish farming tradition as their mandate. “The Torah is…
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Gibson Film Exposes Rift In Vatican Hierarchy
The debate over a papal screening of Mel Gibson’s controversial film has become a flashpoint between liberals and conservatives struggling for power in the Catholic Church under the ailing pope. The pope saw “The Passion of Christ” and is said by conservatives to have praised it in a few words, saying, “It is as it…
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Astir With Gracious Words: The Psalms’ Resurgence
Rabbi Paul Plotkin’s faith in God was confirmed by a single line from the Psalms, but for years nobody seemed to want to hear his story. Devastated by a painful divorce in 1994, the Conservative rabbi turned to his morning prayers for consolation; he found it in a verse from Psalm 30, “At night one…
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Embattled Academic Tony Judt Defends Call for Binational State
Tony Judt is a scholar who was until recently best known for his writings on European history. But then, in a 2,900-word essay in the October 23 edition of The New York Review of Books, Judt dropped the intellectual equivalent of a nuclear bomb on Zionism, calling for the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish…
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Un-Freudian Principles Of Dream Interpretation
And Pharaoh dreamed “he stood by the river. And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, well-favored and fat-fleshed; and they grazed in the reed-grass.” But the seven thin cows that came after them ate them up, and the seven fat blades of wheat in the next dream are eaten by seven…
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Senator: Saddam Nab, Dean’s Rise Make GOP An Easy Sell
The capture of Saddam Hussein and the rise of Howard Dean are making President Bush and the Republican Party a much easier sell in the Jewish community, Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman says. “My effort is made easier by Howard Dean, by Dean’s not having a strong record on the war on terror, by his comments…
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