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.
Enough of medical warnings. If you want to relax and keep happy at home, watching musicals is just the thing. Here are some selections by our favorite Jewish composers and lyricists, many of which are available to stream online; the songs also might be found on Spotify, Apple Music or other music streaming services.
I’ve written the soup, the parting of the sea, the savage plagues and the candles
“In the theater you are either Jewish, Italian or gay and I chose Jewish,” says Protestant-born lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. during a conference call that includes his long time Jewish collaborator, composer David Shire. “Musical theater is so profoundly Jewish—it’s like living in a Kibbutz—you can’t help becoming Jewish. Also, my wife is Jewish, my children are Jewish and we belong to a temple.”
The filmmaker went to major lengths to use what he called distancing devices—shots at odd angles and no melody—to keep the audience from identifying with the murderer.
Imagine a U.S. law that kept thousands of European Jews and others from obtaining visas to the United States in the 1930s, leaving many of them to deportation and death.
Recalling a past that was so different from wartime and its terrors, she wrote: “I was only familiar with one of them, the one perfumed with luxury and flowered with orchids.”
A master of the English language who was not born into it, Stoppard exhibits an arresting verbal dexterity, a mix of joy, wit and wordplay.
Apeirogon, the new novel by acclaimed author Colum McCann, could take place anywhere, yet is also essentially
