Though Sholem Aleichem is widely known for his depictions of Eastern European shtetl life, the famed Yiddish writer spent a number of years living and writing in America. In a new documentary titled “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness,” director Joseph Dorman details the life of Sholem Aleichem, from his early successes to his many,…
It was a memoir I’d been trying to write for three years without much success. I’d been wanting to tell the story of how, in the summer of 2008, I’d traveled to Warsaw, Poland, for a week with my wife and my 13-month-old son, Noah. Mornings we were tourists, while every afternoon was spent hanging…
Happy Shavuot, everybody!
Photo by Ahron D. Weiner In 2004, photographer Ahron D. Weiner took his first trip to the gravesite of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in Uman, Ukraine. Before his death in 1810, Nachman is said to have promised that if his followers came to his grave on Rosh Hashanah, he would intercede on their behalf in…
When we talk about the Enlightenment, or the Haskalah, in Europe, we have a general historical sense that all Jews were in ghettos and then the walls came down. One day pogroms, the next Einstein, Freud and Kafka. The period of time was indeed extraordinary, as Michael Goldfarb elucidates in his book “Emancipation: How Liberating…
Last week, my 15-year-old son, a Facebook junkie like all his peers (and his mother), showed me the newly public only extant video footage of Anne Frank, which has raced around the Internet, mesmerizing many of us. I think I’ve watched it 20 times. The all-too-brief clip of a girl unknowingly at the apex of…
