A great American novelist dies
Philip Roth: A Life Recalled
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Books Short Friday
Earlier this week, Avi Steinberg wrote about Kafka in Tel Aviv and shared a horribly embarrassing memo. His first book, “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” was just released. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
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The Schmooze Nick Kroll, ‘The League,’ and the (New) New Jew
When Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy discusses the arcane symbolism of his girlfriend eating a banana, or talks about time spent alone in the bathroom with women’s underwear hanging on the door, or any number of other things that can’t even be implied in the html of a family website, he is revealing his innermost “perversions”…
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Books Q&A: Author Michael Wex on the Jewish Comic Novel
Michael Wex is best known for his acerbic, authoritative books on Yiddish language and culture, but in this fall’s “The Frumkiss Family Business,” he has turned his attention to fiction. The sprawling novel is a farcical family saga, following three generations of a Jewish clan in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighborhood and questioning, in Wex’s characteristically…
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The Schmooze Out and About: David Grossman in Frankfurt, Idan Raichel at the Opera
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…
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The Schmooze This Week in Forward Arts and Culture
Ranen Omer-Sherman leafs through “Turn Right at the End,” a controversial comic book series by Israeli artist Sivan Hurvitz. Philologos gets devilish. Stuart Schoffman reviews Philip Roth’s latest novel, “Nemesis.” I review Elie Wiesel’s latest novel, “The Sonderberg Case.” Allan Nadler reviews the unfortunately titled “The Relationship of Orthodox Jews With Believing Jews of Other…
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The Schmooze Howard Jacobson Goes Short for the Booker Prize
For most New Yorkers, the idea of Jews beyond Israel, New York and New York South (aka Florida) is an annoying complication. For many American Jews, the existence of proud, older, historically significant communities in places other than America and Israel is a constant surprise. As a friend of my then girlfriend asked when first…
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The Schmooze Fred Melamed, The Most Serious Man of All
Larry Gopnik, the main character in the Coen brothers most recent and most Jewish film, “A Serious Man,” has been widely understood as Job-like figure. But what would Job be without Satan to test him? (Besides having more children and fewer boils, that is.) Enter Sy Ableman, Larry’s beardy nemesis, whose role as self-righteous cuckolder…
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Books Taking a Cold Shower in Philip Roth’s Room
Someone on the grounds crew at the Corporation of Yaddo, the artists colony in Saratoga Springs N.Y., has a sense of humor. In the “Breast Room” (so-called because Philip Roth wrote “The Breast” while residing in it) of the West House building, the shower is mislabeled. When one turns the dial from off at the…
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