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Art for Art’s Sake, and More: Engaging the Collective, As Well As the Individual
Bliss By Ronit Matalon Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., 260 pages, $23. * * *| One of the challenges facing fiction writers in countries rife with political violence and conflict, such as Israel, is how to mediate tensions between the needs of the collective and those of the individual. While this tension between “engaged literature”…
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METROPOLITAN NEW YORK
High Holy Days Initiate Yourself: The egalitarian “liberal” East Side Synagogue offers introductory services catering to the unaffiliated. The liturgy is in English and Hebrew and is meant to draw out the relevance and meaning of the High Holy Day period, a time of rebirth and renewal, introspection and moral inventory, forgiveness and growth. All…
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IN OTHER WORDS…
Picture This: Partisanship may be a staple of pre-election years, but this year’s candidate-bashing by the media seems to have a particularly nasty flair to it. Take, for instance, John J. Miller’s cover story in the September 1 issue of the conservative National Review, titled “The Awful Specter of Yet Another Term.” The article takes…
The Latest
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You’re in the Army Now
Infiltration By Yehoshua Kenaz, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu Steerforth Press, 593 pages, $19.95. * * *| The existence of the Israeli army is the fact that, above all else, makes Israel different from all Jewish communities since the wars against Rome two millennia ago. The spirit, expertise, power and even the morality…
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SPEAKING OUT ON CENSORSHIIP
In May 1943, New Yorkers gathered together in Bryant Park to remember the tens of thousands of Nazi sympathizers who gathered on college campuses across Germany on May 10, 1933, to participate in the burning of some 25,000 books by scientists, philosophers, political theorists and poets labeled “degenerates” by the Nazi regime. For the opening…
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Newsdesk September 19, 2003
Abdullah, Jewish Leaders Meet Jordan is seeking the right timing to send its ambassador back to Tel Aviv and will “hopefully” do that soon, Jordan’s King Abdullah II told a small group of Jewish community leaders in Washington Monday. The king, currently in the United States for a meeting with President Bush, was “upbeat and…
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Rav, Rebbe, Rabbi
M r. Rosenberg writes from Kansas City: “A group of us were discussing the derivation of the word ‘rabbi.’ We know what it means, obviously, and are aware of its various permutations — rov, reb, rebbe, rebenyu. But what is the root meaning of the word?” The root meaning of the Hebrew word rav, “rabbi,”…
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Rabbi Facing Fraud Charges Plans Return to Fundraising
A Brooklyn rabbi charged with defrauding the federal government of almost $700,000 is proclaiming his innocence and vowing that his legal troubles have only temporarily halted his prodigious political fundraising. Milton Balkany, the dean of an Orthodox girls’ school in Boro Park, surrendered to authorities on August 26 to face charges that he used a…
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FLASH FRAMES
Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments By Oz Shelach City Lights, 115 pages, $11.95. * * *| Had Ernest Hemingway succeeded in writing the novel suggested by the vignettes that punctuate “In Our Time,” the result might have resembled Oz Shelach’s “Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments.” The novel, Shelach’s first, is set in an…
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CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL
Dean Defense: In his latest attempt to mend fences after the dustup over his comment that the United States “ought not to take sides” in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Howard Dean is trying to assuage the ire of Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman. In an interview with the Associated Press, Foxman described Dean’s remark, recorded…
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J’Accuse
J’Accuse By Aharon Shabtai New Directions, 64 pages, $14.95. * * *| In “J’Accuse,” whose title is taken from Emile Zola’s famed letter against the French government during the Dreyfus Affair, Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai accuses his society of brutally oppressing the Palestinians. In the title poem, Shabtai refers to Mohammed al-Dura, photos of whose…
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