Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Many moons ago, when I was a graduate student in Jewish history happily spending my days doing little else but reading, one of the most intriguing books I encountered was not Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed,” or “Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrin” or, for that matter, Hannah Arendt’s “The…
It might seem as though the stand off between medieval Jewish philosophy and contemporary hip hop culture had been decisively decided in favor of the latter. But not so says young African-American author Thomas Chatterton Williams. Published this past spring by The Penguin Press, Williams’s “Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books…
When the Israel Museum reveals its newly renovated campus in July 2010, it will display a curious (and extreme) blend of Renaissance and modernism. The museum will feature two large-scale, site-specific works by Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor and Danish installation artist Olafur Eliasson, as part of the site’s $100 million architectural reconfiguration. And, for the…
