Joshua Furst
By Joshua Furst
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Culture Geeking Out on Primo Levi — and Elena Ferrante — With a Master Translator
The great Italian writer Primo Levi is primarily known in this country for memoirs detailing his experiences in Auschwitz, his long journey home after the end of the war and his life as a chemist of Jewish descent in the quiet precincts of Piedmont. These books, published in America as “Survival in Auschwitz,” “The Reawakening”…
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Culture When Art Poses a Challenge to the Orthodox
Jens Hoffmann, Daniel S. Palmer and Kelly Taxter, the curators of the Jewish Museum, have a difficult job. They can’t help but recognize the limitations of revisiting the same narrow band of Jewish tropes with each and every show they present. There are only so many fresh ways to revisit the Holocaust, the Jewish immigrant…
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Culture Jonathan Franzen’s Moral Hazard
Purity By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $28 In 1969, after having written two earnestly serious novels that scrutinized the morality of his times in stately elegant prose, Philip Roth wrote “Portnoy’s Complaint.” A bawdy riff on sex and the impossibility of living up to the expectations of overbearing mothers, it reads…
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Culture In ‘Alexandrian Summer,’ Their Hearts Belong to Egypt
Alexandrian Summer By Yitzhak Gormezano Goren Translated by Yardenne Greenspan New Vessel Press, 200 pages, $15.99 Late in Israeli writer Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s luminous 1978 novel “Alexandrian Summer,” which has just been published for the first time in English in a fluid translation by Yardenne Greenspan, a tired rabbi watches disapprovingly as a group of…
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The Schmooze Why I’m Protesting PEN’s Award For Charlie Hebdo
When I heard that the writers Deborah Eisenberg, Teju Cole, Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Rachael Kushner and Taiye Salasi had publically withdrawn from their roles as table hosts for PEN America’s annual gala in protest over the organization’s decision to award Charlie Hebdo the Freedom of Expression Courage Award, my first reaction was to cringe…
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Culture Why David Greenspan Is Easy To Admire But Hard To Like
I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees By David Greenspan Directed by Leigh Silverman Abrons Arts Center Over the course of decades, the writer, director and actor David Greenspan has built a body of work that downtown theater people consider with something close to awe while the general public has often been baffled. He’s won six Obie…
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Culture Not Your Bubbe’s Brooklyn
Brooklynite Book by Michael Mayer and Peter Lerman Music and Lyrics by Peter Lerman Vineyard Theatre This theatrical season has seen not one but two musicals about superheroes in Brooklyn. The first, Itamar Moses, Michael Friedman and Daniel Aukin’s “The Fortress of Solitude,” which was mounted by the Public Theater in the fall, was a…
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Culture What’s Black and White and Jewish All Over?
● Your Face in Mine By Jess Row Riverhead Books, 384 pages, $27.95 On a warm Sunday in February, an unidentified black man approaches Kelly Thorndike as he walks through a parking lot in Baltimore on his way to shop for groceries at the local Asian market. When Kelly sees this man, he feels a…
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