Jenna Weissman Joselit
By Jenna Weissman Joselit
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Culture Where Have All the Yizkor Ladies Gone?
Yom Kippur always struck me as one of the constants in modern Jewish life. While virtually everything outside of its precincts seems to be in a continuous state of flux, this holiday holds its own. The rushed pre-fast dinner and the elaborate post-fast fete, the majesty of the Kol Nidre prayer and the intrusiveness of…
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The Schmooze More Than Just ‘Radio Shmadio’
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Over the years, I’ve attended lots of symposia but never one that began with the ringing of chimes and concluded with a most hearty and prolonged round of applause. These two sounds, along with the sight of presenters swaying to the beat of “Yiddish Melodies in Swing” or singing…
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The Schmooze God and Man in Tampa
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree People in funny hats, empty chairs, a capella singing, overheated rhetoric, a red dress — the Republicans put on quite a show in Tampa last week at their national convention. Most of it left me cold. What didn’t was the ardent public display of religion, especially the ritualized invocation….
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Culture The Sacred and the Profane
In a 1935 review of “Porgy and Bess,” Virgil Thomson, one of America’s most distinguished music critics, famously dismissed George Gershwin’s music as a form of “gefilte fish orchestration,” harshly consigning it to the ghetto of Jewish music rather than situating it within the broad expanse of American culture. Lazare Saminsky, Thomson’s contemporary and a…
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The Schmooze Radio Days Are Here Again
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Nearly 30 years ago, when musician and musicologist Henry Sapoznik first stumbled across a cache of aluminum transcription disks of Yiddish radio shows from interwar America, little did he suspect that they would find a home at the Library of Congress. Abandoned in an attic, deposited in a dumpster,…
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The Schmooze Jewish Colonial Americans in All Their Glory
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Two friends of mine, ardent champions of all things cultural, were en route to Los Angeles the other day when they decided to stop off in Bentonville, Arkansas, to see the brand new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Given all the advance publicity the museum received, they knew…
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The Schmooze Western Wall, Now in Bilgoraj
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree The news that members of the Isaac Bashevis Singer Association of Bilgoraj intend to build a replica of the Western Wall at the site of the Polish town’s Jewish cemetery undoubtedly raised an eyebrow or two. Coming on the heels of an announcement that the International Pro-Life Memorial and…
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Culture When Mom and Pop Owned the Shop
Food, glorious food is what virtually everyone I know talks about incessantly. What we ate, where we ate it and who made it constitutes a hefty chunk of our daily conversational fare. But were it not for the urban grocery store, that all-but-vanished institution, we wouldn’t be singing the praises of mozzarella, olive oil and…
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