28 Jan
Arts & Culture, Guest Blog, Latest, Sarina Roffé

The Term Sephardic Jew

By Sarina Roffé People often ask me to define the term “Sephardic Jew.” The answer is complicated. No, it does not mean “from Spain,” although that is the commonly understood definition. It also does not mean anyone who is not Ashkenazi. For example, Jews who migrated to Italy during the time of Judah Maccabee or as slaves under Julius Caesar do not think of themselves as Sephardic. Neither do Greek or Persian Jews. Do they use Sephardic liturgy? Yes. Sephardic texts? Yes. Common religious customs? Yes. But these groups do not think of themselves as Sephardim. So who is a Sephardic Jew? According to references in Genesis 10:3 and Obadiah 1:20, the lands called Sepharad were in areas north of the Holy Land, and were not necessarily in Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. If you define a Sephardic Jew as...

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03 Dec
Guest Blog

Born to Be Red

Dissident Gardens Jonathan Lethem Doubleday 2013, pp. 384, $27.95  Review by Lydia Kiesling Born to Be Red Before I began reading Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, I was advised to obtain a copy of Vivian Gornick’s Romance of American Communism for a little crash course on its context. Although the deeply knowledgeable proprietor of my local radical bookshop, Bolerium Books (“Fighting Commodity Fetishism with Commodity Fetishism”), informed me that Gornick’s collective memoir of American communism is hardly the authoritative text on the subject, it turned out to make a satisfying accompaniment to Dissident Gardens. Lethem is indebted to Gornick—he thanks her in his acknowledgments—and it is clear that he has borrowed from the recollections she assembled. Readers are likewise indebted to Lethem for distilling these personalities, and this immense but ultimately moribund force in American political life, into one electrifying novel. The biographical sketches that...

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