Joshua Furst
By Joshua Furst
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Culture Why Wisconsin Was a Terrible State To Grow Up Jewish
My early childhood was spent in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington D.C., which at that time in the early 1970s was a uniquely progressive place. Our lower-middle-class neighborhood, large looping cul-de-sacs of red-brick row houses, contained a more diverse population than anywhere I’ve lived since. Black, white and brown people, Christians, Jews, Hindus and…
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Culture Few Bright Spots for Jewish Books in 2014
It’s been a brutal year. As always, the world is in chaos. We hear about it every time we read the news, or turn on the television, or check our Facebook feeds. ISIS, Gaza, Ukraine, Ferguson, campus rape. Russian oligarchs have taken over New York City. Corporate citizens have taken over the government. Though the…
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Culture Nazi Hunter Meets Nazi Architect
Dani Gal is of the generation of Israeli artists who, instead of creating their national myths, grew up with them, lived under their spell, and watched as the myths grew into monoliths meant to define a people’s sense of themselves. His work is infused with a discomfort over the causal inevitability between the Holocaust and…
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News Free To Be You and Me and Jonathan Lethem
When I heard that The Public Theater was mounting a musical adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude,” I was skeptical of what kind of hot mess it might become. I’d read the book when it came out in 2003 and deeply admired both its encyclopedic evocation of 1970s Brooklyn and its astute understanding…
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Culture Utopian Dream of Israel Dies in ‘Salt of the Earth’
Some sand, some buckets, a few brooms, some paper cut outs, a handful of toy cars, trucks and tanks, a kieg light, a video camera hooked up to a live feed, and a single puppet. This is all Zvi Sahar and his Puppet/Cinema team of precision performers require to tell a story that encompasses all…
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Culture In ‘10:04,’ Ben Lerner Sings a Song of Himself
● 10:04 By Ben Lerner 256 pages, Faber and Faber, $25 What is a novel? What purpose does it serve? In what way does the novel engage with the reader and what is the intellectual, emotional, dare I say, ontological texture of the exchange between the two? How much fidelity must a novel show to…
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Culture Slouching Through Catalonia, One Jewish Site at a Time
This summer, my wife and I spent our vacation in Barcelona, Spain, because a friend had offered us free lodging in the apartment her family had held onto after they fled Franco’s Spain. I’d longed to visit the city for years, mostly because of the romantic notions of the Catalan people’s anarchistic spirit that had…
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Culture The Unbearable Sadness of Being Robin Williams
From the beginning of his career straight through to the end, Robin Williams was a superstar, an unavoidable cultural presence, yet when I attempt to conjure memories of his performances, I don’t compulsively recite famous punchlines or stream emblematic bits in my head, not at first. It takes a second before that ribbity “nanu nanu”…
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