Marissa Brostoff
By Marissa Brostoff
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Culture Why Only Jewish Boys Get To Keep Their Noses
How Come Boys Get To Keep Their Noses? By Tahneer Oksman Columbia University Press, 296 pages, $30 We seem to be living in a golden age of comic female abjection. Not long ago, the ethereal fantasy women that film critic Nathan Rabin famously dubbed “manic pixie dream girls” ruled the airwaves. These magical creatures continue…
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News Israeli Martial Arts Gurus Duke It Out For Real
When grandmaster Haim Gidon, a top-ranking practitioner of the Israeli martial art of Krav Maga, entered a studio in New Jersey on a recent Monday, the 20-odd people in the room stopped pummeling each other and lined up like soldiers standing at attention. Gidon was visiting from Israel to give them advanced training, and the…
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Israel News New Magazine on Campus
As major media outlets across the country file for bankruptcy and scatter their employees to the wind, several college students affiliated with Hillel, the ubiquitous Jewish campus-life organization, are starting their own national magazine. The first national edition of Schmooze magazine, published this past fall, features a guide to 21st-century matchmaking; an essay cautioning would-be…
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News Economic Crisis Preserves Lower East Side
About a year ago, the owners of the Streit’s matzo factory, a pillar of Manhattan’s Lower East Side since 1925, announced that they planned to sell the building and move their operations to New Jersey. The family-owned company was asking $25 million for the factory building, a price that seemed realistic given the neighborhood’s white-hot…
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News What Sort of Man? Madoff on the Couch
In Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice,” Shylock, the usurious lender, attains the status of literature’s classic antisemitic stereotype, in part because of his relentless preying upon non-Jews. But the victims devastated by Bernard Madoff, the investment guru charged with running an alleged Ponzi scheme that blew through $50 billion of other people’s money, were…
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News In Terror, Satmar and Chabad Rabbis United
While most of the media attention in the wake of the attack on the Chabad-run Nariman House in Mumbai has focused on slain Lubavitch emissaries Gavriel and Rachel Holtzberg, less noted was the death of a third Hasidic Jew in the assault, Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum, a member of the Satmar sect. What makes Teitelbaum’s death…
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News Chicago Temple Takes New Security in Stride
Chicago — On a recent Sunday afternoon at a historic Chicago synagogue, the sanctuary was packed but the mood was restrained: A longtime congregant had died, and about 300 people had turned out for his funeral service. But amid the solemnity, the occasional mourner discreetly pulled loved ones out to the synagogue’s front steps to…
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Israel News A Match Made in Heaven?
You might call it a one-state solution: The grandson of Edgar Bronfman, former president of the World Jewish Congress, is engaged to M.I.A., the Sri Lankan electronica star who raps on one of her hit singles: “You wanna go? You wanna win a war? Like PLO, I don’t surrendo.” The visibly pregnant M.I.A. has told…
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