‘Carol Leifer Gets Weirder: Now Jewish, Lesbian, and Vegan,” an online gossip headline blared after the comedian filmed a Web ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. While most of that line rings true — Leifer is Semitic, same-sex loving and vegan — “weird” is the last word that comes to mind for…
Commemorations continue apace for the hundredth birthday of the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). Born in Riga to a Russian Jewish family, he is being honored by the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Toronto (Sept 3-6); a Harvard conference from September 25-26 and other academic events. Yet much remains also for general…
Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector By Benjamin Moser Oxford University Press, 496 pages, $29.95. Clarice Lispector was, in her own words, “guilty from birth, she who was born with the mortal sin.” She also was one of the past century’s greatest writers. Lispector’s childhood was spent in Recife, a large, poor city…
I don’t remember the first time I saw a Katharine Hepburn film, but I’m sure it was sometime back when I was in what used to be known as junior high school. One of the local New York television stations was airing a classic movie every afternoon for a week, and I rushed home from…
Erin Einhorn’s family folklore reads like delectable fiction. Her grandfather leapt from a moving train bound for a concentration camp to save her mother — then a child — who was hidden by five people in three countries by the time she was 9. In 1945, Einhorn’s grandfather invited a Polish family, the Skowronkis, to…
A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1996-2008 By Adrienne Rich W.W. Norton & Co., 208 pages, $24.95. Seventy-nine-year-old Adrienne Rich has always refused to succumb to the multiple traumas that life has thrust upon her. One senses that this courageous poet and political activist has been blessed with an overabundance of resilience and…
During his 1980 Nobel Prize lecture, poet Czesław Miłosz quoted French philosopher, mystic and social agitator Simone Weil, who claimed that “distance is the soul of beauty.” “Only through a distance,” Miłosz added, “in space or in time, does reality undergo purification.” February 3 marked the centenary of Weil (1909-1943), who died in England of…
For someone who’s recently written a novel about teenage Orthodox Jewish lesbians — it could even be called the definitive novel, since there isn’t exactly a surplus of teen Orthodox lesbian fiction floating around — Leanne Lieberman isn’t really the ideal spokeswoman for the “Orthodyke” community. As a matter of fact, she’s neither Orthodox nor…
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