The Sway Machinery promises that its 3rd LP, “Purity and Danger,” is its “most chiseled enunciation of its foundational concept” yet — and it delivers on this promise. In a return to Afro-pop infused cantorial traditionals and modern blues myth-making, The Sway Machinery comfortably resettles into its epic vision, though this time with even more…
Garry Kasparov tells us what it’s like to play chess in the shadow of Bobby Fischer. In a 1923 article in The Nation, “Romanian-Jewish-American-Yiddish novelist, journalist, dandy, screwball folklorist of the Gypsies” Konrad Bercovici described “The Greatest Jewish City in the World.” An Israeli forger almost managed to sell a fake Kandinsky for three million…
Rachel Rubinstein looks to the future of Yiddish literature in translation. Jay Michaelson questions the intuitive power of religion. Jenna Weissman Joselit wonders what Cyrus Adler would have thought of contemporary museum going. Gordon Haber gets depressed by Yael Hedaya’s “Eden.” Alexander Gelfand listens to the evolution of Jewish music at the Folksbiene. Philologos goes…
Talia Bloch sings the praises of poet and Bollingen Prize-winner Allen Grossman. Philologos wonders when ‘Palestine’ became such a controversial word. Jenna Weissman Joselit pores over Chief Rabbi of Cincinnati Eliezer Silver’s ledger book. Benjamin Ivry appreciates the Jewish artists at the Villa la Fleur museum outside of Warsaw. Joshua Furst questions the theatrical pieties…
Michael Goldfarb celebrates the Man Booker Prize win by English Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences plans on giving an honorary Oscar to Jean-Luc Godard. But will they be honoring an anti-Semite? Benjamin Ivry investigates. Fifty years after his initial rise to fame, novelty songwriter Allan Sherman is as…
How a machinist named Martin Cohen became the pre-eminent photographer of New York’s Latin music scene. Montreal’s Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen is set to be turned into a musical. Is it time to update the Hebrew alphabet for the Internet age? Read an interview with Allen Ginsberg collaborator and “Howl!” illustrator Eric Drooker. The trailer for…
I’ve been spending the morning pacing around the house singing Kol Nidre while my two-year-old son Jacob toddles about playing with his toys. Just like every year, it seems, the High Holidays arrive to find my life in a startling upheaval of activity, with the world swinging back into movement after the sultry months of…
My musically sophisticated Orthodox friends often tell me that they are not interested in Jewish music. It’s not hard to see why. If you take the material produced by the Orthodox pop industry, it’s often just the frum equivalent of Justin Timberlake, or over-produced boys choirs backed up by obnoxious electronics and phony string arrangements….
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