Opening Quarrel and Quandary, Cynthia Ozick’s latest collection of essays, is like removing the top from a box of quality chocolates: one doesn’t know where to begin. Despite a few mysterious squiggles and shapes, most of these bonbons have delectable fillings, as one might expect from the Jewish world’s foremost belle-lettrist. However, some of these…
Tag: American
Adventures of a Yiddish Lecturer
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I believe that Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Levine, Philip Roth and probably numerous other Jewish writers have penned comical reminiscences about their experiences delivering lectures on various subjects to Jewish audiences. To this list we must add the relatively unknown name of Abraham Shulman. An American essayist and former contributor to the New York Daily…
A remembrance of J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)
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Not having published a thing in almost half a century apparently hasn’t diminished the fame of America’s most reclusive writer. J. D. Salinger died in January at the age of 91, prompting some hopeful observers to wonder whether he left a vault full of manuscripts to be published posthumously. Born in New York in 1919…
Jewish genealogy in Pennsylvania
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Anyone with the surname Eisen (which means ‘iron’) knows that Jews have had an historic involvement in the steel trade. From Shtetl to Milltown: Litvaks, Hungarians, and Galizianers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1925 by Robert Perlman is a thorough local history that chronicles the rise of various Jewish communities in a sprinkling of towns in and…
An organization that redeems lost Jews
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A New York rabbinical court made a precedent-setting halakhic decision last summer that could eventually pave the way for legions of “lost” Jews to return to Judaism. The case revolves around Wendy Armstrong, a real estate professional in St. Louis, Mo., who was raised in a Christian home and attended a Methodist church as a…
Bernard Malamud’s Collected Stories
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In a literary career that stretched roughly from 1940 to his death in 1986, Bernard Malamud wrote a handful of acclaimed novels, including The Natural, The Fixer and The Assistant. Between the novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author refined his artistry by writing short stories. For the first time, all of Malamud’s short fiction has been…
Kurzweil’s classic ‘From Generation to Generation’
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It has been almost 25 years since novice Jewish genealogist Arthur Kurzweil wandered into the Jewish Division of the New York Public Library to search the card catalog for references to the Galician shtetl of Dobromil, where his father and numerous ancestors had lived. Kurzweil had heard enough family legends and stories about the town…
A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico
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It has been only about two decades since tales began surfacing in the popular press of Hispanic-Catholic families in the American Southwest who lit candles in secret on Friday evenings and retained other long-held family customs bearing unmistakeable resemblance to Jewish rites. Some families abstained from work or travel on Saturday, circumcised newborn boys, drained…
Film: Mendelsohn’s memorable Judy Berlin
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It’s hard to convey the essence of Judy Berlin (1999), though not the excited reactions it tends to generate. An American-made black-and-white feature written and directed by Eric Mendelsohn, Judy Berlin focuses on the intertwined lives and aspirations of a curious ensemble of characters (some Jewish) living in a Long Island commuter town called Babylon…
Schmelvis: the ‘King’ as Jewish
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Evan Beloff, co-producer of a new documentary that demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that American rock idol Elvis Presley was Jewish according to halakha or Jewish law, was only half-joking when he said that the film uses Elvis “as a metaphor for identity — I think it’s a quest film about Jewish identity.” Titled “Schmelvis:…
