Joel Streicker
By Joel Streicker
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Culture A Sensitive Finger On the Pulse of Politics
Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics By David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 144 pages. $18.00. In the wake of the Israeli elections and their policy ramifications, reading this essay collection, which is composed mostly of material written in the past couple of years, occasioned a certain vertigo:…
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Culture Not Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos
Three Balconies: Stories and a Novella By Bruce Jay Friedman *Biblioasis, 203 pages, $24.95. * Beginning in the 1960s, Bruce Jay Friedman’s literary star burned hot and bright — acclaimed novels, plays, short stories, screenplays — only to dim after his screenplay for “Splash” was nominated for an Oscar 25 years ago. Although “Even the…
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Culture No More Shoah, Let’s Build A New Israel
The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes By Avraham Burg, translated by Israel Amrani *Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pages, $26.95. * Avraham Burg’s new book, “The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes,” is maddening: It is by turns incisive and hard-hitting, but also bombastic, vague and repetitious. It is also…
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Culture Man in Search Of Language
Readers expecting a grand symphony on how Hebrew was revived as a living language beginning in the late 19th century will be disappointed by Ilan Stavans’s “Resurrecting Hebrew.” The book deals more with Stavans’s own re-encounter with the language and its meaning for his life than with the creation of modern Hebrew in the late…
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Culture Family: A Self-Portrait
I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions By Rafael Goldchain Princeton Architectural Press, 168 pages, $40. There is something unsatisfying about Rafael Goldchain’s faux family photo album, “I Am My Family” — and it is this very quality that accounts for its considerable fascination and power. A photographer who has long explored questions of…
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Culture A Step-by-Step Guide to Peace in Israel
The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last By Bernard Avishai Harcourt, 304 pages, $26. The old adage notwithstanding, everyone judges a book by its cover. When the cover features a subtitle that promises to tell us how lasting peace can be achieved for Israel, the skeptical reader…
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Culture Visiting Fidel’s Infidels: Ruth Behar’s Return to the Cuban Home She Never Knew
An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba By Ruth Behar, with photographs by Humberto Mayol Rutgers University Press, 288 pages, $29.95. It is hard to begin a book with a section of “blessings for the dead,” but then it is hard to hail from a community that one never really knew much about. In…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish וואָס איז געווען דאָס ערשטע לשון אויף דער גאָרער וועלט?What was the first language on earth?
דער רוימישער אימפּעראַטאָר פֿרעדעריק דער צווייטער האָט געזוכט אַן ענטפֿער צו דער פֿראַגע אויף אַ וויסנשאַפֿטלעכן אופֿן.
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Fast Forward Federal judge temporarily blocks Louisiana’s law requiring classrooms to display Ten Commandments
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Theater They created a musical about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Today’s activists are listening
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Opinion Voters elected Hitler because they liked his fascist promise. Trump’s reelection repeats that history
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