Hidden away for a decade, a beloved Jewish artist’s mural awaits its return to the public eye
Ben Shahn's 13-piece 'Resources of America' at a former post office in the Bronx, has been inaccessible since 2014
Ben Shahn's 13-piece 'Resources of America' at a former post office in the Bronx, has been inaccessible since 2014
Though he was often called a philosemite, the truth is a lot messier
Perhaps the greatest American poet ever to have lived, Walt Whitman was not always regarded as such. Thanks, in part, to the emergence of modernist forms in poetry toward the end of the 19th century, Whitman’s work did not attract critical attention until after his death in 1892. But for Jewish immigrant poets living in…
Elizabeth Rich as Rosalind Franklin in ‘Photograph 51.’ Photo by Stan Barouh. Watching the current production at Washington D.C.’s Theater J of Anna Ziegler’s “Photograph 51,” which tells the tragic tale of Jewish scientist and almost Nobel laureate Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (1900)….
To an American reader, accustomed to individualistic poetry of Walt Whitman or the confessional writings of Silvia Plath, the recently published collection of Israeli poet Rivka Miriam, “These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam” (Toby Press) may seem like a deliberate insult. Throughout the collection, there is a constant sense of removal — or, perhaps,…
In “Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman transformed his life into a poetic portrait of America and all its vastness, diversity, and tension. More than 150 years later, writer-director Tim Blake Nelson does something similar in his “Leaves of Grass,” a film that draws on his native Oklahoma, his college days at Brown, and his Jewish…