Joshua Cohen
By Joshua Cohen
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Culture On Adorno On Music
Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962 By Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Wieland Hoban Seagull Books, 492 pages, $29.00. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was a philosopher only after he was a composer, as if the music he made in his youth required an entire system, and a later age, of interpretation. There was a method to…
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Culture La Mort Que Je Conviens
Ghérasim Luca was born in 1913 in Bucharest and, as a Jew and intellectuel, spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German and French, the last being the language of his books. A dissolute late adolescence found Luca traveling often through Paris, where he became interested in the movement called Surrealism. He spent the war hiding in Romania, which…
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Culture The Christian Soldiers of the Holy City
Knights of Jerusalem: The Crusading Order of Hospitallers, 1100-1565 By David Nicolle Osprey Publishing, 224 pages, $25.95. They began as a charitable organization, a brotherhood charged with caring for Jerusalem’s indigent pilgrims before the First Crusade. They ended the Crusades as warlords, infamous for their violence and greed. This role reversal would seem to be…
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News Eulogy for a Fading Jewish Wonderland
There’s a strain of Zionism peculiar to the Q train — that subway line wending its way from Manhattan’s Lower East Side and over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, through Hasidic Midwood, past the Russians in Brighton Beach, then terminating at Coney Island’s Stillwell Avenue stop, “the largest subway station in the world.” If Brooklyn…
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Culture The Poet Who Invented Himself
Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet By Nili Scharf Gold Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 424 pages, $35. Even to those who have no Hebrew, the name “Yehuda Amichai” might sound like a line of poetry, and poetry, at its best, should communicate through sound alone. But Yehuda is also Hebrew…
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Culture Training a Lens on Israel’s Female Soldiers
Serial No. 3817131 By Rachel Papo Powerhouse Books, 128 pages, $39.95. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child proclaims that its signatory states “shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited…
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Culture Coffee Talk: Reading Friedrich Torberg’s Masterpiece
Tante Jolesch or The Decline of the West in Anecdotes By Friedrich Torberg Translated by Maria Poglitsch Bauer, edited by Sonat Birnecker Hart Ariadne Press, 249 pages, $24. Café society finds its most perfect literary expression in the anecdote, a short, fast form embodying the corner table’s blend of gossip and exaggeration, caffeinated humor and…
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Culture The Relative Arts
Albert Einstein elucidated his theories of relativity in detached, specific prose, with no thought for style or flourish. We should be thankful that he never wrote philosophy, produced a novel or wrote a sequence of poems. The laureate of Germany, and later of Princeton, was no painter, either, and no sculptor. And though he relished…
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