JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Amanda Lindner has a jar of trash. It’s not a big jar and it’s not a big amount of trash. In fact, in this five-inch jar is all the trash she’s created in the past five months. When Lindner moved into her first solo apartment in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, she committed to a zero-waste…
Dan Fogelman, the sadistic Jewish genius behind the sob-inducing NBC television phenomenon “This Is Us” is coming out with a new movie, ambitiously called “Life Itself.” The trailer dropped today, and, yes, it is exactly what you’d expect. If you do not find yourself in a fetal position with a bottle of whiskey and a…
When Anita Diamant’s novel “The Red Tent” hit bookstores in 1997, Jewish women couldn’t devour it fast enough. The book focuses on Jacob and Leah’s daughter Dinah, who only gets one sentence in the Bible. Famously, it tries to upend the narrative of her rape, giving her a voice and a sense of agency that…
It’s sometimes said that religion originated out of the fear of death. We all face the abyss, and we all grieve when our loved ones pass away. From this utter meaninglessness, the theory goes, myths of meaning arise. A review of Biblical literature, however, calls this theory into question. Unlike many indigenous and shamanic traditions,…
It’s not giving anything away to say that Lifetime’s new movie “Twist of Faith” ends with its mismatched romantic leads back together, embracing on the threshold of her home. Nor does it reveal anything to note that Music and the Power of Song connect Toni Braxton’s Black Gospel singer with David Julian Hirsh’s doubting, erstwhile…
When “Russian Dolls,” the since canceled Lifetime reality show about a gaggle of Russian women living in Brighton Beach, premiered on the Lifetime Network, my Brighton friends and I gathered around a television to mark the occasion. What we were expecting was something akin to a Russiafied “Jersey Shore.” What we saw was, remarkably, much…
“Life and Fate,” the 900-page opus by Vasily Semyonovich Grossman, is important not only as literature, but also as a history of Stalinist Russia. Since 2006 it has been available as a paperback from NYRB Classics, recently turned into a radio play on U.K.’s BBC 4, and a newly minted paperback can now be found…
Crossposted from Haaretz The recent Europe Theater Prize ceremony in St. Petersburg gave me a chance to meet with Lev Dodin, the director of St. Petersburg’s Maly Theater, who won the prize back in 2000. Israel’s Gesher Theater hosted the Maly recently for their adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate.” Dodin’s perception of time…
