I love Alice Walker. I love her prose style, I love her ultra left-wing politics and the way they fuse with her artistic sensibility. I just finished her extremely complex time-spanning epic novel “The Temple of My Familiar” with my thoughts thoroughly provoked and her images in my head. But I don’t love her decision…
You can’t say Alice Walker doesn’t put her money where her mouth is. The news that the Pulitzer-prize winning American novelist has refused to authorize a Hebrew-language translation of her landmark novel “The Color Purple” comes as little surprise. She has been involved for decades in pro-Palestinian activism. Initially drawn to the cause after the…
A reader wishing to be identified only as “Harry” has a question about the Mishnaic tractate of Pirkei Avot or — as it is often called in English — “The Ethics of the Fathers.” (The Hebrew title literally means “Chapters of the Fathers,” the book being divided into six chapters in which many of the…
Murray Lefkowitz of Merion Station, Pa., writes a letter stating his opinion that it “may have been an unfortunate choice” that Hebrew became the language of the state of Israel, since “Yiddish was the more common tongue for almost all Jews prior to 1948.” The claim that Yiddish, not Hebrew, was the real national language…
Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry By Alan Mintz Stanford University Press, 544 pages, $65 The 19th-century German writer Heinrich Heine foresaw what would happen to his fellow Jews: “If Europe were to become a prison,” he mused, “America would still present a loophole of escape… Then may the Jews…
In response to my column of two weeks ago in which I objected to the use by Jews of the term “Old Testament,” several of you have expressed the opinion that the best alternative to it is “Hebrew Bible.” Miriam Segall of Minneapolis, on the other hand, wants to get even more Jewish that that….
Like so many parents these days, comedic actor and musician Jack Black is having a lot of stress about getting his kids into a good school. Last week, he told Conan O’Brien that he recently resorted to some desperate measures — well, at least desperate Jewish word dropping — to impress the admissions people at…
The other night, I handed my daughter, Mika, a plate of chicken and carrots for dinner. She glanced at it momentarily before professing snidely, “Mama, this is not delicioso!” The declaration was remarkable for two reasons: The first was that I had made dinner, the second that my 2.5-year-old cracked a joke. Her hero, Dora…
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