Writing About Jews and Fighting for Gay Rights When Masha Gessen, 49, fled Russia as a teenage refusenik to come to America, she probably never imagined that she would someday become one of the Kremlin’s primary antagonists. But three decades on, she has emerged as one of the loudest and most eloquent critics of autocracy,…
Whether you love or hate the result, the election is over, and it’s time to find comfort and re-focus. A historical festival in New York, talk with Masha Gessen in San Francisco, and Israeli film festival in Chicago might prove just the ticket; if you’d rather stay home (we don’t blame you), unwind with the…
For a couple of weeks several years ago, my Facebook wall filled up with photos from friends participating in the First International Summer Yiddish Program in Birobidzhan, the capital city of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia’s Far East. These were delightful group pictures taken next to the main points of interest for visiting Yiddishists…
The highly eccentric, reclusive 43-year-old Russian Jewish mathematician Grigori Perelman devised proofs for a number of important problems, most famously the Poincaré Conjecture, a longstanding topology puzzler, only to abandon mathematics just as fame and prizes exploded around him. To write about this curious character, the publishers of a recent book, “Perfect Rigor: a Genius…
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