Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree “There’s more?!” exclaimed a colleague rather incredulously upon learning that I was going to be out of the office for the third time in as many weeks because of the chagim, the Jewish holidays. She didn’t know the half of it. Though they make a hash of my schedule…
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree It so happened this year that Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, coincided with New York’s Fashion Week, prompting some eagle-eyed observers to trumpet the possibility of a showdown between the “shofar and the shows,” a clash between the “Goddess of Fashion” and the God of the patriarchs and…
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Late one evening, unable to sleep, I was channel surfing when I happened on a documentary about Hudson River bricks. Lest you think, as I did at first, that the subject would put me to sleep in no time at all, I found myself utterly engrossed — and wide…
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree By now, I don’t suppose there are many people in the world who would liken the groves of academe to an earthly paradise. Too much has been written of late about tensions between faculty and university administrators, student ennui and diminishing resources, to hold up the academic enterprise as…
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree I try to follow and keep abreast of a lot of things: the news, for starters, as well as fashion and film and arts and culture. But I give baseball and basketball, much less soccer, a pass. You will rarely, if ever, catch me reading the sports section of…
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree One of the most exciting — certainly among the most crowded — of exhibitions in New York at the moment is the Met’s “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity.” And for good reason. Training its sights on the triangulated relationship among these three mighty cultural forces of the late 19th century,…
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree What’s striking about the holiday of Pesach isn’t its historicity so much as its contemporaneity. There, I’ve said it. You would think that I would be most quick to praise the festival’s biblical origins, the ninth-century roots of the haggadah, or, at the very least, great grandma’s Depression-era dishes….
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree This past week New York had its knickers in a twist when fashion designer John Galliano was spotted wearing an ensemble and sporting a hairdo that, at first blush, summoned up the external appearance of the Hasidim: oversized black hat, long black frockcoat, black knickers and payes. Some cried…
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