David Mikics
By David Mikics
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Culture Why the World Still Needs Saul Bellow
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune By Zachary Leader Knopf, 832 pages, $40 ‘Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Saul Bellow asked on his deathbed. By “man,” of course, he meant mensch. Zachary Leader, Bellow’s new biographer, answers Bellow’s dying question: “Both.” Bellow was a jerk: Famously prickly and…
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Culture Perplexed By Maimonides? Here’s Guide for You.
Maimonides: Life and Thought By Moshe Halbertal Princeton University Press, 400 pages, $35 About 800 years before the Pew study, Moses Maimonides received a worried letter from the leader of the Jewish community of Yemen asking him how to combat the specter of assimilation. Yemenite Jews had recently been afflicted by persecution and by a…
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Culture Is There Anything Jewish About Giving to Charity?
● Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition by Gary A. Anderson Yale University Press, 232 pages, $30 Charity, as an old joke puts it, sometimes does begin at home, but it always begins with an annoying phone call. But Jews, with their high rates of charitable giving, have often been eager…
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Culture Franz Kafka’s Birthday Offers Kafkaesque Dilemma
● Kafka: The Years of Insight By Reiner Stach Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Princeton University Press, $35, 720 pages In September 1913, Franz Kafka, employee of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of Prague and recently the author of two flawless, utterly disturbing stories — “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis” — took a…
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Yiddish וואָס אַקטיוויסטן פֿאַר שפּראַכן אין אַ סכּנה קענען זיך אָפּלערנען איינער פֿונעם צווייטןWhat activists for at-risk languages can learn from each other
אַ דאַנק טעכנאָלאָגישע שותּפֿותן און צוזאַמענפֿאָרן קענען אַקטיװיסטן פֿאַר כּלערלײ שפּראַכן זיך הײַנט טײלן מיט פּראַקטישע עצות.
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Film & TV In this civil rights protest, Jews both fought and defended segregation
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Culture 50 years after its debut, ‘Hester Street’ reminds us what it means to be a Jew in America
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Fast Forward As latest Elon Musk controversy swirls, some American Jews come to his defense
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