Lost Time: Painting through a Pandemic
Confined to her home studio outside Tel Aviv during the COVID-19 lockdown, artist Zoya Cherkassky started producing a painting a day.
Confined to her home studio outside Tel Aviv during the COVID-19 lockdown, artist Zoya Cherkassky started producing a painting a day.
Does time move differently for Jews? Does Judaism have its own view of time?
The first time I read a book by Philip Roth, I read it from back to front.
“It galls me when Mrs. America keeps underscoring the friction among feminists rather than grappling with the complexity of our challenges.”
When The Restaurant launched in Sweden in 2017, the website Drama Quarterly said that the series “is as brave, bold and ambitious as they come. A sprawling ensemble drama that opens in the aftermath of the Second World War and runs across two decades, it is an emotion-filled family saga that charts the fortunes of the owners and staff of Djurgårdskällaren, a high-end restaurant in the heart of Stockholm.” The show’s first season won the Kristallen Award for Best Swedish TV drama.
Simon and Burns thus expand the point of view of the series, taking us outside Philip’s home and into Evelyn and Alvin’s lives. In doing so, they fill out Roth’s characters, shaping them into vibrant and complex figures driven by clear motivations and desires. They strive to tell a more complete story of the Levin family, one that showcases Alvin and Evelyn as people in their own right, more than what Phillip sees.
In his foreword to Linda Sarsour’s memoir of political activism, Harry Belafonte remarks, “It wasn’t that long ago that we lost Martin and Malcom and Bobby.” He is comparing the vilification of Sarsour, the hijab-wearing, Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American, for her anti-Israeli politics to the murderous racist violence of the 1960s. It seems a stretch.
Something about watching civilization and its institutions collapse makes me nostalgic for the dystopian novels of my childhood.