Before you even see her face, Vanessa Davis’ naked breast makes an appearance in the first panel of “Spaniel Rage,” her acclaimed book of diaristic comics. She’s vomiting into a garbage can on page two. By the third page, she’s servicing two clowns in an X-rated thought bubble. Rude? Shocking? Indecent? Try “charming, funny, and…
Amateur Shakespearologist John Hudson is not the first to question whether the actor William Shakespeare was actually the author of the body of work we’ve come to know as his, but Hudson is the first to suggest that the true author was a Jewish woman named Amelia Bassano Lanier. Of Italian descent, Bassano lived in…
Painter Joseph Solman died last week at the age of 99. In these pages last fall, Albert Fayngold penned a timely appreciation for this “fabulously gifted yet woefully underappreciated American master.”
l Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives By Bluma Goldstein University of California Press, 235 pages, $39.95. We would do well to remember that when we say “according to the rabbis,” we are historically saying “according to men.” According to the male rabbis who wrote the Talmud and who, for European generations, were the…
It was just before Rosh Hashanah when poet Dinah Berland, estranged from her son for 11 years, stumbled upon a book of women’s prayers that she believes led to her reconciliation with him. As Berland tells it, in 1998 she had wandered into a Los Angeles store that sells used books, when a slim book…
News from Sotheby’s London is that the it will auction “The Wailing Wall, Jerusalem,” by German-born Jewish artist Gustav Bauernfeind. The estimate given in the press release is £600,000-800,000. It’s the latest in a line of pictorial depictions of the site to hit the auction block, as Jeannie Rosenfeld reported last month. And, compared to…
A word of praise for an oft-overlooked genre: the newspaper illustration. This past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review offered the Jewishly minded reader two especially good examples of the art — drawings that with a few quick brushstrokes manage to capture their subject’s essence. The first, accompanying Christopher Hitchens’s new book, “God is Not…
The Romance of a Shop By Amy Levy, edited by Susan David Bernstein Broadview Press, 278 pages, $15.95. Reuben Sachs By Amy Levy, edited by Susan David Bernstein Broadview Press, 251 pages $15.95. Oscar Wilde adored her, calling the young writer “a girl of genius,” while modern critics, in their flippancy and an attempt to…
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