Shoshana Olidort
By Shoshana Olidort
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Culture Poetic Yearnings
Yehuda Halevi By Hillel Halkin Nextbook/Schocken, 368 pages, $25. The medieval poet Yehuda Halevi was a man consumed by yearnings, for women, for love, for the divine. All these found expression in Halevi’s prose and poetry. But perhaps none plagued the poet so much as his longing for Israel, a desire that would remain unsatisfied…
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Culture Essential Inauthenticity: Narrative Nostalgia Revisited
A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True By Brigid Pasulka *Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 368 pages, $25.00. * A new literary genre has been making waves recently — one that might be called the narrative of nostalgia. Think Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon and Gary Shteyngart, to name just a few authors who,…
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Culture Hungry for Home
Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love By Lara Vapnyar Pantheon, 160 pages, $20. Ernest Hemingway once called the stomach “the premier seat of the emotions,” which may explain why people often seek to mitigate adversity by indulging in food. One might expect that the lonely immigrant stomach would be especially sensitive, and indeed,…
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Israel News Not Working Out?
Afeud over noisy dogs has turned into a case of alleged antisemitism in rural western Pennsylvania. For years, neighbors have been filing complaints about the noise level from the Barber property, where husband and wife Mike and Paula run a dog kennel. The Barbers keep as many as 130 dogs at a time. Mike Barber…
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Israel News The Pastrami Chronicles: Famed Deli Closes
It was the “new boy in town” when it opened 50 years ago, said owner Jack Lebewohl. Now it’s the last to bow out, marking the end of an era on New York’s Lower East Side. The Second Avenue Deli, which symbolized to generations of New Yorkers the past glory of the avenue once known…
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News Dancing Around a Delicate Issue
‘Joy shatters barriers,” says a well-known Jewish aphorism. It’s a phrase that many Orthodox synagogues will take literally Tuesday evening with the beginning of Simchat Torah, one of the Jewish calendar’s most joyous days. When the yearlong Torah-reading cycle comes to a close, all Orthodox congregations will dance with their Torahs. But some will do…
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Israel News Too Good To Be True the Shmooze
This past Sunday was Jewish Heritage Day at Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets. Along with their nine innings, the game’s 42,412 spectators got shofar blasts, viewed the hora and heard a Yiddish choir’s rendition of “America the Beautiful.” By the fifth inning, however, fans had little reason to cheer; the home team…
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Culture Congregational Schools Seek New Vision
Congregational Hebrew schools aren’t easy to love. Students are expected to give up their Sunday mornings and weekday afternoons — and, often, soccer practice, ballet rehearsal or any number of after-school activities — to memorize ancient history, learn basic Hebrew and study their prayers. Is it any wonder that, according to some, less than 50%…
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