Winners of the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards, announced this morning by the Jewish Book Council, include Daniel Gordis, whose “Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn” won Book of the Year, Rose Tremain, who won the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award in Fiction for “The Gustav Sonata,” and Michael Chabon, who was awarded the…
The first volume of the Jewish Book Council’s new annual literary journal, Paper Brigade, isn’t exactly subtle in its messaging: its cover, designed by Katherine Messenger, features sketches of an attractive set of bookish people utterly lost in Jewish literature. They seem to occupy a bubble of calmness. One woman sits absorbed in Anita Diamant’s…
Should you have happened, the evening of December 5th, to be taking a stroll on Manhattan’s 16th street, allowing yourself a romantic sigh over the Christmas trees winking in the windows, you would likely not have guessed you were especially close to a gathering of giddy Yiddishists. And yet you were; the Center for Jewish…
‘Jews say that if you change where you live you’ll change your luck, but is America really that different?” That’s the first line of an excerpt from Abraham Cahan’s “The Additional Soul,” a story that, translated to English from Yiddish by Jordan Kutzik, appears in the new anthology, “Have I Got a Story For You:…
When Lipa Schmeltzer’s new music video, “Hang Up the Phone,” hit the Internet last week, I didn’t know what to think. What on God’s green earth was this? The video is a study in contradictions. So much so that, as Josh Nathan-Kazis observes, it enters into the Uncanny Valley between Hasidic and mainstream culture. With…
Before Marion Jacobson discovered the accordion, she was a classical music critic for The Washington Post and an academic with a doctorate in ethnomusicology from New York University. But after wandering into Manhattan’s Main Squeeze accordion store in the fall of 2001, she knew she had found a new passion. So, needing to make space…
A Holocaust-themed video game called “Sonderkommando Revolt,” based on a 1944 uprising at Auschwitz, has been withdrawn. Chibi Vision, “your new favorite science fiction hip-hop boy band” talks about the Jewish love-hate for Christmas. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, but what does its future hold? LABA, a Jewish house…
The Arty Semite contributor Christopher DeWolf profiles Hong Kong’s Rabbi Asher Oser and looks at the city’s Jewish history. The Jewish Chronicle talks to actor Elliott Gould. VICE Magazine talks to author Sam Lipsyte. “Lipstikka,” an already-controversial film by Israeli director Jonathan Sagall, will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. Anselm Kiefer’s…
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