Why the new play ‘The Gospel According to Chaim’ is a big deal
Playwright Mikhl Yashinsky proves you don’t need a Yiddish-speaking milieu to create high-quality works of drama in the language
New Testament
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Yiddish World -
Theater For Christmas, the story of the Jewish-born Christian missionary who translated the New Testament to Yiddish
New Yiddish Rep’s ‘Gospel According to Chaim’ gracefully grapples with a taboo subject
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Culture Q & A: How Do You Write A History Of The Bible?
The Bible may be the most-recognized book in the world, but its origins remain obscure. We can’t say with certainty who wrote much of it, when the bulk of it was composed or even where. But we now have a handy primer to the most significant theories about those questions in John Barton’s “The History…
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Culture Sure, Jesus Was Son of God. But How Was His Fiction?
● Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi By Amy-Jill Levine HarperOne, 320 pages, $25.99 When we were children, many of us (especially those of us in yeshivot) were taught to abominate the Christian Scriptures; they were precursors to 2,000 years of Jew hatred. At the very least, it was suggested…
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Culture The Gospel According to British-Jewish Author Naomi Alderman
● The Liars’ Gospel By Naomi Alderman Little, Brown and Company, 320 pages, $25.99 It is odd that in a media-saturated time when people seem unable to remember important events that happened last week, much less the decades-long story of how we got into the economic and political mess we’re in, historical storytelling flourishes. Whether…
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Culture The New Testament Sounds Odd in Yiddish
In my September 6 column about a Yiddish translation of the Qur’an, I observed that many of the singular effects created by translating the sacred scriptures of Islam, a religion closely linked to Judaism, into an intensely Jewish language like Yiddish would no doubt be found in a Yiddish translation of the Christian New Testament,…
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The Schmooze Israeli Lawmaker Destroys New Testament
He’s not exactly known for his sensitivity, but Israeli lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari has rarely made a statement that has the potential to offend quite so many people. Many lawmakers were peeved to receive a complimentary New Testament in their Knesset mailbox, courtesy of a Christian publisher. Anything perceived as missionary activity touches a very raw…
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Culture What Should We Call Christian Bible?
Last week I dealt with the New American Haggadah, edited by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. A few days after writing the column, I noticed an op-ed by Foer in The New York Times in which he discussed the new Haggadah in light of his evolving relationship with Jewish tradition. Speaking about how raising children has…
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