Joshua Furst
By Joshua Furst
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Culture How a Schlumpy Kid Named Art Spiegelman Changed Pop Culture
Like a handful of other artists and thinkers of the past 50 years — Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg come to mind — Art Spiegelman has transformed the medium in which he works so radically, and influenced the artists following in his shadow so completely, that society itself has been altered….
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Culture The Exile and Resurrection of Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall. The name alone conjures a world — a simple, superstitious village, smelling strongly of hay and manure. The single story houses all have thatched roofs. The people are poor, uneducated, but their lives are filled with magic. Angels and ghosts wander among them. Sometimes devils, too. And that fiddler you hear on the…
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Books Rachel Kushner’s ‘The Flamethrowers’ Arrives With a Bang
● The Flamethrowers By Rachel Kushner Scribner, 400 pgs, $26.99 In many ways, “The Flamethrowers,” Rachel Kushner’s novel about the historical, political, cultural and — most daringly — ideological chaos of the 1970s, is a simple bildungsroman. It tracks the sentimental education of its heroine, Reno, from starry-eyed, eager youth, lusting after experience — her…
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Culture The Return of Richard Foreman, Rabbi of New York’s Downtown Theater Scene
In the bad old days, when downtown Manhattan was still overrun by scruffy, industrious, half-lunatic artists exploring the possibilities of theater and performance with great purpose but no thought toward the market, Richard Foreman was our rabbi. Each spring, a new play written, directed and designed by him would appear at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the…
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Culture Why Susan Steinberg May Be the Best Jewish Writer You’ve Never Read
● Spectacle By Susan Steinberg Graywolf Press, 152 pages, $14 In the current literary environment — conservative by inclination, market-driven by intention — it’s often hard to see the true accomplishment of a work of fiction through the buzz and packaging that surrounds it. The book is a product targeted toward a pre-existing class of…
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Culture How David Mamet Abandoned His Art
Posted outside the Golden Theater on 45th Street — where, until recently, David Mamet’s newest play, “The Anarchist,” was running right down the block from his masterpiece, “Glengarry Glen Ross” — is the full text of an opinion piece Mamet wrote for The New York Times in November entitled “Considering the Excesses of Protest.” In…
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Culture The World That Mariam Said Loved
Imagine that, instead of a Middle East ruled by tyrants, riddled with militants and ruined by war, the region was a model of cosmopolitan tolerance and sophistication, where people of all creeds and faiths live in harmony. In her memoir, “A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman” (Nation Brooks), published in English…
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Culture Holocaust Memoir Fraud Inspires Novel
The Canvas By Benjamin Stein Translated by Brian Zumhagen Open Letter Paper, 342 pages, $16.95 In 1995, a man named Binjamin Wilkomirski published a memoir called “Fragments,” in which he described the horrors of his childhood in Poland during the Holocaust. The book was a big deal. It was heaped with laurels, including the National…
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