A great American novelist dies
A great American novelist dies
A great American novelist dies
A great American novelist dies
The title “Indignation” doesn’t suggest a movie about nostalgia. But “Indignation,” directed by James Schamus and based the 2008 novel by Philip Roth, is about nostalgia in its purest form — about the way time slips through our fingers, about the bittersweet solace of memory, and about how every choice has unforeseen and irreversible consequences….
A candidate galvanizes a weakened and divided Republican Party. He’s a celebrity, a charismatic outsider with no political experience, and his racist rhetoric does nothing to halt his momentum. As Philip Roth wrote, “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.” Am I the only one who — just a week ago — pulled Roth’s…
No one does dystopia quite like the Jews. We claim no monopoly but, after Hitler (and to paraphrase Walter Pater), all dystopias all aspire to the condition of Jewish tragedy. And it seems that the official anthem for dystopias is 1982’s “Mad World,” by Tears for Fears. It’s not always used for obvious sadness. Here…
“The indigenous American berserk,” Philip Roth called it. He was writing about the violent, calamitous antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s, when the center would not hold, when prosperous, placid Swede Levov, the Newark businessman at the center of Roth’s “American Pastoral,” saw his idyllic life upended by a beloved daughter who went the way…
Sundance Film Festival, the film industry’s annual takeover of Park City, Utah, kicked off last Thursday, and already three films of particular note have been picked up for distribution. Weiner In May, Sundance Selects will release “Weiner,” filmed primarily during Anthony Weiner’s second bid to become mayor of New York City. The film was supposed…
In May, 2015, we profiled Paul Beatty, author of “The Sellout.” Now that Beatty has become the first American to win the Man Booker Prize, we’re revisiting that article. As it turns out, Beatty isn’t that much like Roth after all — Roth never won the Booker (he did, however, win the Man International Booker in 2011)….
Purity By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $28 In 1969, after having written two earnestly serious novels that scrutinized the morality of his times in stately elegant prose, Philip Roth wrote “Portnoy’s Complaint.” A bawdy riff on sex and the impossibility of living up to the expectations of overbearing mothers, it reads…
1) 82,270 Jews live in Michigan. 2) Michigan’s first Jewish settler was Ezekiel Solomon. A fur trader, he operated a general store during the Revolutionary War. 3) Montreal-born fur trader Chapman Abraham was Detroit’s first Jewish settler, arriving there in 1762. 4) Founded in 1885 in Traverse City, Congregation Beth El is Michigan’s oldest synagogue….
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