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News How Many Russian Speakers Are in U.S.?
They make up about 10% of the American Jewish community, but no one is entirely sure how many Russian-speaking Jews there are in the United States. At a recent conference at Harvard University, the answer fluctuated from as high as 750,000 people to fewer than 500,000, depending on which expert took the podium. Sam Kliger…
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Culture Is This Any Way to Name a Train Station?
Forward reader Eldad Ganin has sent me an excerpt from an English-language publication in the Ukrainian city of Lviv (better known by its Polish, Yiddish and Russian name of Lvov), along with a query. The excerpt reads: Why Central Trains Stations in Ukraine Are Called ‘Vokzal’ It is believed that the word vokzal originated from…
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Opinion The Cossacks Are on the Rise Again. For Real.
Time magazine has one of the scariest news reports I’ve read in a while. It seems the Cossacks are on the rise again. No, not figuratively — literally. The fanatically religious pan-Slavic paramilitary tribe that terrorized your great-grandmother’s great-grandmother in the old country is recruiting, operating youth training camps, running for office (successfully) in Russia…
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Books The Tragic Lives and Loves of Joyce’s Russian Translators
June 16 is Bloomsday, the day when Leopold Bloom, the Jewish-descended protagonist of James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” took his quasi-Homeric one-day odyssey through Dublin. It’s the day when Dubliners and Joyce’s fans throughout the world celebrate the legacy of the great Irish novelist, whose protagonist transcends all cultural and temporal borders while remaining both Irish…
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The Schmooze Russian Jews (Finally) Get Their Own Museum
They’ve largely disappeared as residents, but Russia’s Jews now have their own museum. Billed as the first Jewish museum in the country, the Moscow center opened recently following several years of planning. Exhibits are divided between two general themes, focusing on either Jewish practice or on Jewish history in Russia. Radio Free Europe reports that…
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The Schmooze Regal Theater in St. Petersburg
Crossposted from Haaretz The Europe Theatre Prize award ceremony, held 10 days ago in St. Petersburg, Russia, was the most impressive and certainly the most moving out of the five times I’ve had the honor of attending this event. This was due not only to this year’s prize winners and their work, but also the…
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The Schmooze Running Down a Dance
Crossposted from Haaretz Leonid Jacobson bears the distinct honor of being both the only Jewish choreographer active in the Soviet Union during the Communist era and a man who won praise from Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova after they defected to the West. The search for Jacobson has brought dance historian and researcher Janice Ross…
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The Schmooze Isaac Babel’s Last Days in Lubyanka
During a script reading at the Jewish Museum London on October 24, two writers with mortality on their minds came face to face: the bushy-eyebrowed 83-year-old East End poet and kitchen sink dramatist Bernard Kops, and the eternally 45-year-old journalist and playwright Isaac Babel. “Some things grab you; you know what makes a play,” explained…
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