Marissa Brostoff
By Marissa Brostoff
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Israel News Chabon and Waldman: The Couple That Kvells Together
Ayelet Waldman — novelist, wife of writer Michael Chabon and fervent supporter of her former Harvard Law School classmate Barack Obama — spent last week on the delegates’ floor of the Democratic National Convention, cheering for her candidate. “It was like a Grateful Dead concert in the ’70s,” Waldman told The Shmooze. “Wherever you were…
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News Beach Bungalows: Summer in the City
One of the first images in Jennifer Callahan’s documentary “The Bungalows of Rockaway” is a close-up of a woman’s wrinkled face wearing an expression of amazement and delight. The face belongs to Maxine Marx, daughter of Chico, and we see that she is watching a black-and-white film reel of a family carousing on the beach….
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Culture For Author, Memoir Sparks New Conversation
Depending on how you look at it, Masha Gessen’s “Blood Matters” (Harcourt) is either an unusually philosophical memoir of a cancer diagnosis or an unusually personal account of the complex ethical questions surrounding the issue of genetic testing. What do we want to know, and what don’t we want to know, about our own fates?…
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News Last Call for Landsmanschaften? Aid Societies Fold as Old-Country Ties Fade
For the members of a century-old Jewish fraternal society, the organization’s breakup has literally turned into a fight over graves. The Rohatyner Young Men’s Society is one of the last of the landsmanschaften, benefit societies formed at the turn of the past century by groups of townsfolk who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Thousands of…
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News Truth in Comic Quips
Growing up in a sleepy town in Connecticut, writer Esther Cohen learned from her family the art of conversation as a competitive sport. “The main leisure activities they did were eating and talking,” Cohen told the Forward. “So those are the two things I pretty much know how to do.” In her new book “Don’t…
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News Georgia on Their Mind: Expats Forced To Juggle Dueling Identities
When U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner organized an emergency meeting for the Georgian community in New York, he didn’t hold it at a community center, church or school auditorium, but at an ornate synagogue on a residential block in Queens. Of the 5,000 or so Georgians who live in the New York area, at least 3,000…
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Culture Rabbis Focus on Professional Development
Moses was probably an introvert. That was one of the conclusions reached by the rabbis who gathered at a pro fessional development seminar in Manhattan this summer. As part of the seminar, the rabbis took the Myers-Briggs personality test, which measures how introspective, intuitive and perceptive people are, to better understand how they operated in…
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News Polish Investigators Tie Partisans to Massacre
As Paramount Pictures gears up its ad campaign for a new movie about a band of Jewish partisans who fought the Nazis, some in Poland are suggesting that the partisans in question may also have been murderers. In anticipation of the December release of “Defiance,” — starring Daniel Craig, the actor best-known as the latest…
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