So rumored honorees Bob Dylan and Philip Roth were shut out of the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. “Zol zein mit mazel,” as the Yiddish equivalent of “Don’t worry, be happy” goes. The newly-announced crop of recipients by the Nobel Committee includes an indisputably worthy and artistically inspiring awardee in the field of Chemistry,…
As a result of some unusual timing, the Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded posthumously to scientist Ralph M. Steinman. Steinman, a Canadian-born researcher who worked at Rockefeller University, died of pancreatic cancer on September 30, but word of his passing did not reach the Nobel Committee in Sweden before it announced the award…
David Grossman has won the German Book Trade Peace Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Isaac Bashevis Singer comes to Carbondale, Illinois. As the music consultant for The Israeli Opera, Idan Raichel has chosen Vieux Farka Touré to open the new season on November 26. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in…
The 51st yahrzeit of Dr. Raphael Lemkin, the international lawyer who created the United Nations Genocide Convention, will doubtless pass unnoticed on August 28, just as his 50th did last year. This is not unexpected: Lemkin — who coined, conceptualized and defined genocide and who worked tirelessly inside and outside the U.N. to make its…
Anyone traveling through Germany this month has until June 27 to see a landmark exhibit at the Jewish Museum Berlin, “Flight and Metamorphosis: Nelly Sachs, Writer, Berlin/Stockholm.” The exhibit, which opened March 25, pays homage to Nelly Sachs, the only German-language poet ever given the Nobel Prize. In 1966, Sachs shared the Nobel with Israeli…
/> At 80, the Hungarian Jewish Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész is battling Parkinson’s disease while laboring on two new autobiographical works. Best known for his fiction-like “Detective Story”, “The Pathseeker”, and especially “Fatelessness”, Kertész pensively, with verbal virtuosity (he has translated many German-language authors, including Freud and Joseph Roth, into Hungarian), expresses his experiences…
When the Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, he was asked whether he thought of himself as an American or a Russian writer. “I am Jewish — a Russian poet and an English essayist,” he replied. Born into a Jewish family in Leningrad in 1940, he was exiled…
Just about the best analysis of Obama’s Nobel that I have yet seen is this op-ed essay by Alon Pinkas, former Israeli consul general in New York and a close ally of Ehud Barak (that’s more a compliment to Barak than to Alon). His main point is that, as I argued in an earlier blog…
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