Eli Rosenblatt
By Eli Rosenblatt
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Culture A Place Called Ashkenaz
On March 20, Purim will be celebrated in Ashkenaz. This Ashkenaz, however, refers not to the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe but to a performance space in Berkeley, Calif., named Ashkenaz Music & Dance Community Center. This year, the festival of Esther and Mordechai will be celebrated there with a party featuring Shivat…
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News Yiddishists: The Next Generation Takes the Reins
It’s been more than three quarters of a century since young intellectuals were voicing their Yiddish-inflected ideas in the parks, cafés and tenements of lower Manhattan. But the days of the Yiddish intelligentsia are still rolling for 24-year-old Menachem Yankl Ejdelman, who is the newly appointed leader of Yugntruf, a worldwide organization of young Yiddish…
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News Theater Company Reimagines Yiddish Stage
In 1946, a fictional memoir of a resistance fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto appeared in a Yiddish newspaper in Argentina. Titled “Yosl Rakover Talks to God,” the piece described the destruction of Jewish Warsaw in such sensitive detail that it was translated into a multitude of languages, propelling its Lithuanian-born author, Zvi Kolitz, into the…
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Culture Defending Jacob Riis
Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York By Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom The New Press, 288 pages, $35. As incredible as this might seem to some, the generation born in the 1980s has no knowledge of a dangerous New York City. Criminals, the crack epidemic and the streetscapes of starving…
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Culture Rage Against the (Sewing) Machine
Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America By Marc Miller Syracuse University Press, 224 pages, $29.95. Yiddish today, like a century ago, is a sharply divided language. On one hand, it is still the language spoken in countless ultra-Orthodox homes in Brooklyn, Israel and Europe, and on the…
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Israel News Hamas’s TV Bunny: Jews, Not Carrots
The creators of children’s television often focus their attention on improving their audience’s reading skills. Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV station, however, seems concerned with teaching its younger viewers how to spell destruction. A new video shows a human being-sized rabbit named Assud who learns that his brother, a bee, has died after being denied passage to…
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Israel News Christopher Columbus: Jew?
There may be a statue of Christopher Columbus next to an Astoria subway station in Queens, but some ambitious historians are promoting arguments that could lead some to think that such a statue is better placed on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Claims that Columbus was of Jewish origins have been circulating for years now, mostly…
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News Touring the Old World: Ruth Ellen Gruber Explores Eastern Europe
For that quiet expatriate in each of us, Ruth Ellen Gruber is living a European dream. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1971, she went to Europe, spent 10 years as a United Press International correspondent and never returned to live in the United States. Now, with the release of her newly updated “Jewish Heritage…
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