Gaby Glueckselig’s 100th birthday, celebrated last week at the Leo Baeck Institute for German Jewish History, represented a convergence of New York past and present, German and Austrian culture, experience and youth. For 25 years, Glueckselig’s name has been almost synonymous with the Stammtisch, a weekly German-language gathering that was started by two refugees, Bavarian…
When I found out that an ambitious new music festival in New York, the Chelsea Music Festival, was honoring the 150th birthday of Claude Debussy, I was intrigued to learn that the celebration would feature a performance at the Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. Debussy — his high-strung, artistic,…
Philip will have to make room for another Roth. The irony is that Joseph Roth, a Galician-born Austro-Hungarian Jewish writer, dead for nearly three quarters of a century, has never been more alive in the English speaking world. Translator Michael Hofmann, whose gifted ear has graced 11 of Roth’s titles including the recently published “Joseph…
Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore at Einstein’s Berlin home, 1926. Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute. One was a Bengali polymath and Nobel laureate with white flowing beard and piercing eyes. The other was the world famous scientist, with frizzy hair and unkempt appearance. When Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Einstein met in New York, it…
Among the Nazis’ persecuted minorities were Jewish and non-Jewish artists, musicians and writers branded “degenerate” by the regime. “Radical Departures: The Modernist Experiment,” an exhibition currently showing at the Leo Baeck Institute/Center for Jewish History in New York, gathers together work by these “degenerate” artists, including Georg Stahl, Samson Schames, David Ludwig Bloch and others….
A new exhibit at Brandeis University displays two works by Felix Lembersky, painter of the Babi Yar massacre. Has there been an effort to downplay Anne Frank’s Jewishness? “Naked Balzac With Folded Arms,” a sculpture by Auguste Rodin, has been stolen from the Israel Museum. Husband-wife team Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman are developing a…
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