Does the presidential candidacy of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman have a Jewish problem? Some folks seem to think so. The Hartford Courant took its home-state senator to task last week for what it called his “dismal” first-quarter contribution filing, saying there was a “Jewish wrinkle” to Lieberman’s lackluster showing: The senator’s centrist values are out…
A recurrent feature in the Forverts runs under the title of “Mishpokhe Kheyndlekh” (“Household Humor”). The suggestion is that while sometimes the humor is nutty, it is never smutty. But occasionally there is a bit of borderline humor with a hint of sexual impropriety as in the first of the following selections. (The original pieces…
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a poet, librarian and translator living in Brooklyn, N.Y. His Yiddish poems have been published in Der Bavebter Yid, Lilliput review, Tsukunft and the Yiddish Forward, and his poem “questions of dress” was nominated by the Adirondack Review in 2001 for the Pushcart Prize. This poem, “landscape: obscured, silver,” is taken…
Tribute Poets on Postwar Poetry: Prolific poets Edward Hirsch, Alicia Ostriker and Gerald Stern read their own work and the work of Holocaust survivors in “Solace, Affirmation, Renewal: American Poetry After the Holocaust.” The reading is presented in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Museum of Jewish Heritage–A Living Memorial to…
In 1995, the documentary filmmaker Pearl Gluck traveled to Hungary on a Fulbright grant to work on a film on the power and origins of Yiddish storytelling in the chasidic tradition. In the end, instead of making a documentary about storytelling, she produced “Divan,” a chasidic story in the form of a documentary — about…
Publishing one’s own zine allows one to kvetch and kvell, rant and rave, race from one sentence to the next from high- to low-brow, sacred to profane then back again. Between 1995 and 2002, Barbara Rushkoff — Barbara Kligman until she married author Douglass Rushkoff — did just that, publishing 16 issues of her zine…
It’s been more than a decade since I first submitted a piece to Partisan Review — it was a review of Sidney Hook’s letters — and received a typed note from William Phillips, the journal’s co-founder and longtime editor, telling me that, with some minor changes, he’d print it. I was overjoyed, partly because any…
A student of Yiddish in Tokyo, a Yiddish songwriter in Greenwich Village and a chasidic newspaper writer in Boro Park all have one book in common — Uriel Weinreich’s “Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary,” which celebrates its 35th birthday this month. Its story starts with a question: What makes a minority language — a language that’s…
An air of frustration filled Courtroom 6 during jury selection in the Brooklyn federal courthouse last week when Juror 46 insisted that despite her own biases she could be fair in the racially charged trial of Lemrick Nelson Jr. When Judge Frederic Block admitted her to a pool of jury finalists, frustration boiled over into…
On May 4, the painter and sculptor Tobi Kahn will once again offer audiences a sacred space when an exhibition of more than 100 paintings from his “Sky and Water” series opens at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y. Since his inclusion in the 1985 Guggenheim Museum’s national exhibition “New Horizons in American…
American authorities are investigating a suspicious money trail that leads from the jungles of South America to the suburbs of Dallas and may shed light on the interlocking finances of some key terrorist networks, including Hamas and Al Qaeda. Federal and Texas state investigators are seeking clues to the origin and destination of millions of…
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