● Happy Are the Happy By Yasmina Reza Other Press, 160 pages, $20 Yasmina Reza’s specialty is the excavation of long-simmering violence from underneath placid bourgeois surfaces. In her two best-known plays, the Tony-winning “Art” and “The God of Carnage,” the French-Jewish writer shows, to great comic effect, how quickly respectability gives way to offense….
I am related to author and Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs. In fact, I am his first cousin twice removed’s wife’s nephew’s wife’s first cousin’s wife’s brother wife’s second cousin’s wife’s uncle’s wife’s second great nephew. As he says, we’re practically brothers. The reason I know this is because Jacobs is in the midst of creating…
“At the end of the world, there is a high mountain, and on that mountain, there is a huge rock, and from that huge rock a pure spring comes gushing out. And at the other end of the world, there is the heart of the world… And the heart of the world gazes and gazes…
If you live in a Jewish neighborhood like I do, you may periodically hear the wailing of a shofar in the distance in the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah. It is a common daily practice among Orthodox Jews, a reminder that the High Holidays are not far off. The evening air, at one time…
Talia Liben Yarmush and her family I always imagined having a large family. I was the middle child of five, and although I can’t honestly claim to have loved every moment I’ve had with my siblings, I feel immensely blessed to have them. Growing up, they were always my biggest role models. I emulated the…
This summer has already given us its fair share of sensational news — from the attempted takeover of Iraq by jihadi militants to Eric Cantor’s downfall to the thrill of victory and agony of defeat at the World Cup in Brazil. And July has only just started. With all this drama, the smaller stories get…
Frimet Goldberger’s children, Shloimy, age 9 and Rachel, age 7. While the daughters and sons of America are celebrating their fathers, I am spending my Father’s Day celebrating my husband, the man who raised us — our family — and stood by me through the tumultuous journey to help me build a new foundation from…
The idea behind Moscow-born Jewish artist Kon Trubkovich’s upcoming show at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York is at once simple and complicated, which is often, and certainly in this case, a good thing for an idea. The idea, as described in Trubkovich’s excitable but considered delivery, “is basically snow.” In practice, this translates to…
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