Jerome A. Chanes
By Jerome A. Chanes
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Culture ‘Portnoy’s Prescience
Promiscuous: ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness By Bernard Avishai Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25 ‘Promiscuous: ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness” is a very serious and very funny book about a very serious and very funny book. Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” published in 1969, was not only an instant…
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Culture Life in British Mandate Palestine
Out of Palestine: The Making of Modern Israel By Hadara Lazar Atlas & Co., 304 pages, $25.95 Another book on “the making of Israel”? It was a scant few months ago that Gershom Gorenberg’s provocative and timely book, “The Unmaking of Israel,” was visited on the Jewish body politic. Now comes novelist Hadara Lazar’s book,…
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Culture Making Sense of Anti-Semitism
A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism By Phyllis Goldstein Facing History and Ourselves, 432 pages, $17.95 Historian Victor Tcherikover used to say that there are few things that have a history of 2,000 years. Anti-Semitism is one of them. And indeed, in our own day, the taxonomy of anti-Semitism yet includes religious and secular…
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Culture How Modern Orthodoxy Flourished On Campus
The Greening of American Orthodox Judaism: Yavneh in the 1960s By Benny Kraut Hebrew Union College Press, 200 pages, $35 One of the great stories of American Jewish life, the Orthodox resurgence of the 1950s and ’60s, has been told and retold by historians, sociologists and novelists. Almost unknown, however, is the narrative of the…
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Culture After Drama With Wiesel, ‘Madoff’ Opens on Stage
Two years down the pike, much of the Sturm und Drang surrounding Bernard Madoff and his elaborate Ponzi scheme has become more nuanced. Nowadays, Madoff’s behavior does more than just provoke shock and indignation; it raises questions about Jewishness, human dignity and, above all, morality. These questions are embodied by the situation of Nobel Laureate…
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The Schmooze Long Lost Jewish Film To Play in Jerusalem
The discovery and restoration of the long-forgotten film “Breaking Home Ties” is the latest revelatory moment in classic American Jewish cinema. The Boston-based National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF) reported this week that the 1922 silent film will be available for screening for general audiences. The only surviving print of “Breaking Home Ties” was discovered…
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Opinion Hebrew Language Charter Schools Are a Bad Bargain
All I hear about these days is the “Jewish future.” Yeshiva University has its very well-capitalized Center for the Jewish Future; federations around the country have established commissions on the Jewish Future. Long gone are “continuity” and “renaissance,” buzzwords that came out of the traumatic findings of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, which suggested…
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Culture Building the Perfect Beast
TWENTIETH CENTURY JEWS: FORGING IDENTITY IN THE LAND OF PROMISE AND IN THE PROMISED LAND By Monty Noam Penkower Academic Studies Press, 407 pages, $65 THE UNIVERSAL JEW: MASCULINITY, MODERNITY, AND THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT By Mikhal Dekel Northwestern University Press, 304 pages, $29.95 ‘Very few people know who I am,” Salvador Dalí is reputed to…
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