There was a time, not so long ago, in the 1960s and ’70s, when being a serious fiction writer required not just a talent for evoking nuanced moments of lived life, but a consciousness of the intellectual and political context in which our lives were being lived. Writers — many of them Jewish — as…
“Do you know why the sea is salty?” I asked Mark Russ Federman, third generation owner of Russ & Daughters during the champagne reception at the June 10 Foundation for Jewish Culture’s 2013 Jewish Cultural Achievement Awards at The TimesCenter. Without missing a beat, he gave the classic shtetl wisdom answer: “Because herrings swim in…
Even for a particularly verdant block in Berkeley, Calif., Michael Chabon’s home is an oasis amidst the university town clatter and clutter. The brown-shingled house is situated on a flowery patch complete with a wooden fence, a warm front porch and a bouncing Labradoodle named Mabel, who happily charges to the gate to greet visitors….
Telegraph Avenue By Michael Chabon HarperCollins, 480 pages, $27.99 It’s like Anton Chekhov said about a pistol appearing in the first act: If a hugely pregnant woman appears in the opening pages, you just know the water will break before you reach the end. That inevitability forms the through-line or engine, the great humming machine…
In 1939, Harold Ickes, President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, proposed that four Alaskan locales play refuge to thousands of Europe’s fleeing Jews. Ickes’s idea -— which would become the premise for Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” — was later bucked by Roosevelt and by several prominent American Jewish organizations. But over the…
Michael Chabon’s novel “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” imagined Jewish refugees turning “Aleyska” into a Yiddish-speaking sanctuary for the “frozen chosen” in the 1940s. But truth is stranger than fiction. As I explain in a short documentary, which will be screened as part of a program on “Other Zions” at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research…
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…
Is Adam Sandler’s next movie going to be about parking cars? Russian Jewish oligarch Roman Abramovich needs an entire island to house his art collection. Read an exerpt of Alfred Kazin’s journals, to be published this spring by Yale University Press. Michael Chabon has been elected director of The MacDowell Colony. How enigmatic Israeli music…
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