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Although London’s hit revival of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” starring Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths closed on July 28, a possible fall transfer to Broadway has been announced. That’s a good excuse to shine light on a neglected Jewish vaudeville great who inspired Simon’s play. In his 1996 “Rewrites: a Memoir” Simon describes how…
A terminal alcoholic who drank himself to death in 1939 at age 44, Joseph Roth, whose ideas about Judaism were often complex and contradictory, has long been an object of fascination. With the publication of his letters, attention has redoubled on the novels and journalism of that passionately pugnacious Austrian-Jewish writer. His work, and especially…
Norman Corwin, the writer and radio producer who died on October 18 at age 101, was often dubbed the “poet laureate of radio” by journalists, but he was rather more than that. Born in an East Boston tenement to parents of Russian-Hungarian Jewish origin, Corwin inspired the following paean of praise from one of his…
From James Joyce to Virginia Woolf, camera-shy European writers were captured on film in the 1930s by German Jewish photographer Gisèle Freund. These psychologically revealing images, in vividly tight close-up — as if the viewer were crammed into an elevator next to the great writer — are enough to guarantee Freund, who died in 2000…
It says something about the fraught history of North African Jewry that one of its most vivid authors of today was inspired to write a reminiscence of her youth not by dipping a Proustian madeleine into her tea, but by almost being crushed by a train. Colette Fellous, who was born in Tunis in 1950…
James Franck, a Jewish scientist who was born in Hamburg, Germany, and was a co-winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in physics, is honored by The University of Chicago’s James Franck Institute and by the James Franck German-Israel Binational Program, hosted at five leading Israeli technical schools. Yet nothing commemorates the work Franck did inside…
Fifty years after his death on July 1, 1961, French modernist author and ferocious anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline is still causing controversy. Last January, an attempt by France’s Ministry of Culture to “celebrate” Céline on this anniversary ran aground after noted Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld pointed out that Céline was not merely the author of such…
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