Editor’s Note In the summer of 2016, the Brooklyn Historical Society’s exhibit “Truman Capote’s Brooklyn” brought new attention to the late photographer David Attie. Attie, who died in 1982, was perhaps best known for his portraits of such luminaries as Capote, Lorraine Hansberry, Leonard Bernstein, Bobby Fischer and Ralph Ellison. Attie had been a commercial…
Editor’s Note: In the summer of 2016,the Brooklyn Historical Society’s exhibit “Truman Capote’s Brooklyn” brought new attention to the late photographer David Attie. Attie, who died in 1982, was perhaps best known for his portraits of such luminaries as Capote, Lorraine Hansberry, Leonard Bernstein, Bobby Fischer and Ralph Ellison. Attie had been a commercial illustrator…
PETA chose what some may consider a strange way to honor the legacy of both the famed Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Warsaw Uprising, organizing a lunch, hosted by the Polish supermodel Joanna Krupa, at which they awarded Singer a posthumous PETA “Hero to Animals Award.” A PETA press release praised Singer for…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the summer of 1976, against the backdrop of the dramatic Entebbe Operation, the Bicentennial celebrations on the Hudson River and the nomination of Jimmy Carter for President at the Democratic National Convention in New York, the Yiddish Forward, then located at its historic building in the…
Ann Landers and Susan Sontag. Allen Ginsberg and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gertrude Stein and Shel Silverstein. And a pioneering journalist named Ab Cahan. When the American Writers Museum opens on the second floor of a Chicago office building this week, Jewish visitors will find themselves well-represented. Jewish names loom large here, from a “Visionaries and…
This week we start sharing events outside of New York as part of our normal roster; festivals of arts and ideas in Chicago and Washington, D.C. are up first. There’s a slew of new books to tempt you, regardless of what you’re craving – history, science fiction, some hearty Yiddish humor – and a few…
In August, Poland’s Cabinet approved a bill that would criminalize using the phrase “Polish death camp” or “Polish concentration camp,” with punishments ranging from fines to imprisonment. It’s one of several recent government reforms that critics have called anti-democratic. The bill also raises questions about Poland’s role in the Holocaust. It echoes the country’s communist-era…
After a screening of “The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” I replied to a chutzpedik questioner: “Isaac never hit on me!” A frequent visitor in the 1930s to my parents’ Leszno 6 one-room home in Warsaw when I was toddler, I reconnected with him in New York in the 1960s when he and my father…
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