Palestinian Haute Cuisine Heats Up
“To this day, most Israeli Jews think of Arab food as cheap ‘hummus-chips (french fries)-salad-kebab’—all said as a single word. But it isn’t really Arab food at all.”
“To this day, most Israeli Jews think of Arab food as cheap ‘hummus-chips (french fries)-salad-kebab’—all said as a single word. But it isn’t really Arab food at all.”
Bulgaria. How little thought I had ever given to Bulgaria, but here it is in the vivid, fast-paced, fascinating new novel The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova. Author of the best-selling novel The Historian, Kostova is a writer who knows how to keep you in suspense, to frighten and amaze you, all while building characters whose fate will matter to you more and more as she reveals a whole country, its history, its tragedy, its politics, its scenery and its sad beauty.
The extraordinary works in this exhibition are rarely seen, and this is their first time in America.
Alan Alda loves to dig to the root of things. He has no patience for jargon, for flimsy logic, for impenetrable lectures. He wants to know: What is time? How do clocks work? What are the processes that govern the universe?
The backward tale, coupled with having young, inexperienced performers play the roles of older adults, just wasn’t believable to audiences, and the show flopped after 16 performances.
We were in Las Vegas (and had been for five months!), where I was appearing twice nightly at Caesar’s Palace in Fiddler. The only possible time for our seder was at 2 a.m.
Into the hell of Bosnia entered Susan Sontag. It was July 1993, her second visit, and she was in Sarajevo to direct a production of Waiting for Godot.
“Passover’s like Thanksgiving. People sit around and eat and drink and tell stories, are glad to be alive.”
A double myth about Yitzhak Rabin has prevailed since his assassination in 1995. For the Israeli right, his peacemaking attempts were and still are evidence of traitorous subversion. For the Israeli left, and especially to much of the outside world, his memory is crowned with rare nobility.
Leonardo Padura’s Heretics is a remarkable book. Padura, who is certainly the most prominent of a small number of Jewish Cuban authors, might also be the most famous writer in Cuba today. Best known in this country for his Inspector Mario Conde detective series…
Just as Daniel Deronda probes the limits and possibilities for women in Victorian England, it addresses a different set of concerns regarding Jewish self-determination in Palestine.
George Eliot’s ‘Daniel Deronda’ was written in 1876, 21 years before Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement—to the astonishment and delight of many contemporaries, and of many Jews ever since.