Scenes From Village Life By Amos Oz Translated by Nicholas de Lange Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 182 pages, $22 If Franz Kafka were a happily married, 70-year-old Israeli family man, he wouldn’t be Franz Kafka. He also wouldn’t be Amos Oz. He might, however, have written something quite like Amos Oz’s new book of connected stories,…
How a complete set of the Bomberg Talmud found its way into King Henry VIII’s library. On the everlasting allure of the Jewish gangster. Mark Harman offers a new translation of Kafka’s short, short story, “A Message from the Emperor.” Bob Cohen reflects on this year’s Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, Poland. The Yardbirds…
Enthused readers of the German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin are impatiently awaiting the announced May 9 publication date of a landmark translation of Benjamin’s “Early Writings” from Harvard University Press. Until then, readers afflicted with Benjamania can delight in a catalog published by the Kunstmuseum Solingen in Germany, “Stellar Immortality” (Die Unsterblichkeit der Sterne, to…
Michael David Lukas’s first book, “The Oracle of Stamboul,” is now available. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: I’ve been thinking a lot these past few months about…
Over a half-century after his death in 1955 at age 40, the American designer Alvin Lustig of Polish-Austrian Jewish origin is more influential than ever. “Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig,” by Steve Heller and Elaine Lustig Cohen, out from Chronicle Books in October 2010, pays elegant homage to the visual thinker….
For over half a century, Alexander Goehr has been one of England’s most important composers, an avant-garde musician whose varied (and often challenging) body of work has been championed by luminaries including Pierre Boulez, Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline de Pré. Goehr’s manuscripts have recently been acquired by the music archive of Berlin’s Akademie…
Contemporary American composers have few able defenders, and once out of sight, composers are often forgotten, so it is good to have a biographical tribute, out in November, from University of Rochester Press to Leon Kirchner, who died in 2009 at age 90. “Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, & Teacher” by Robert Riggs recounts the life…
In this, the second annual Forward Fives selection, we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in film, music, theater, exhibitions and books. Here we present five of the most important Jewish performances of 2010. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. Hapless Hooligan…
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