Why Ed Koch’s response to AIDS was very political and not very Jewish
Recent revelations about the former NYC mayor raise questions about his judgment and decency
Recent revelations about the former NYC mayor raise questions about his judgment and decency
In 1993, artist and activist Gregg Bordowitz premiered his film “Fast Trip, Long Drop,” a not-quite documentary that made for a biting critique of media coverage of the AIDS crisis. The film, in which Bordowitz plays a defiant talk show guest named Alter Allesman — Yiddish for “old everyman” — was shown widely at LGBTQ…
Sarah Schulman had already been covering AIDS as a journalist for five years when she attended a 1987 demonstration organized by the newly-formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as ACT UP. ACT UP members picketed outside New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for 72 hours in protest of the sluggish pace…
In the 1980’s the American Jewish artist and writer Avram Finkelstein was a co-creator of the iconic AIDS crisis protest poster which features a pink triangle with the words “Silence=Death.” How this influential graphic image was designed is recalled in Finkelstein’s new memoir, “After Silence: A History of AIDS Through Its Images” (University of California…
(JTA) — Mathilde Krim, a prominent AIDS researcher who fought the stigma surrounding the disease, has died. Krim passed away on Monday at the age of 91, people close to her wrote on Facebook. The researcher founded the AIDS Medical Foundation in 1983, at a time when widespread homophobia hampered people from speaking out about AIDS,…
Editor’s note: Danny Jacobs wrote this article in December, 1993 and died of AIDS in March, 1994. This article was submitted by his brother, Eli Jacobs, who is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree program in Creative Non-Fiction Writing at Bar Ilan University. In the memoir he is writing for his thesis, Eli is exploring the…
The American playwright and editor William Moses Hoffman, who died on April 29 at age 78, expressed his Judaism through dramatizations of the tragic AIDS pandemic. As Jonathan Friedman’s “Rainbow Jews: Jewish and Gay Identity in the Performing Arts” notes, “Among the first dramatists to write plays about AIDS were gay Jews.” At a time…
Mark Wainberg, a trailblazing Canadian AIDS researcher, reportedly died Tuesday while swimming in rough water in Bal Harbour, Florida. He was 71. Wainberg, who lived in Montreal, was swimming Tuesday with his family when he started struggling with heavy surf and rip currents, Bal Harbour police chief Miguel De La Rosa said, according the the…
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