Jewish Routes // Greater Hartford
Just outside of Hartford proper, Jewish families have intermingled with new immigrants over the years to form an unusually cohesive community in the suburbs of Greater Hartford.
Books That Shaped Great Authors
We asked 20 prominent Jewish authors to discuss the books that shaped them.
Alan Furst Will Always Have Paris
In each of Alan Furst’s 14 novels about spies—not spy novels, he insists there is a difference—characters inevitably end up dining at Brasserie Heininger in Paris. The fictional restaurant, based on the real Brasserie Bofinger, with its opulent marble staircase and shucked oysters, represents the glamour and the joie de vivre of 1930s Paris, a city he calls “the heart of civilization.”
Book Review // The Extra by A.B. Yehoshua
There is a tradition, more prominent in theater than in fiction, of the unwanted guest. One thinks of such works as Kaufman and Hart’s 1939 play The Man Who Came to Dinner; the 1967 Stanley Kramer-directed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner…
Opinion // Challenging History’s Taboos
The Holocaust (Shoah) and the Nakba (al-Karitha) share three characteristics. First, both terms mean catastrophe, disaster or calamity.
2016 Guide To Cultural Arts: Yemenite Israeli sister act A-Wa
“The Guide is an excellent representation of contemporary Jewish Cultural Arts to be celebrated throughout the entire Jewish community and beyond.” —James Goldman, Park Avenue Synagogue, NY.
Mount Zion: Jerusalem’s Wild & Sacred Backyard
Located just outside Jerusalem’s old city walls, Mount Zion is home to King David’s tomb, the room of the last supper and a former mosque. Today, a tangle of neglectful Israeli authorities has allowed the site to become a beacon for ultra-nationalist religious Jews.
Talk of the Table // Just (Deli) Desserts
Like much of the Jewish culinary canon, modern Jewish pastries were influenced by the world around them. The familiar cookies we see now in Jewish-style delicatessens were, in many cases, riffs on the desserts of various immigrant groups comingling with Jews in America…
Reframing Roman Vishniac’s Legacy
Maya Benton was a high school senior living in Los Angeles when the Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac’s first posthumous book, To Give Them Light, came out in 1993. Renowned for his iconic images of Eastern European Jews taken between the two World Wars, Vishniac had died three years earlier at age 92.
Is Free Speech Under Fire on Campus?
Over the past few months, a series of student protests has erupted across the United States on campuses such as Amherst, Dartmouth, Ithaca, the University of Missouri and Yale. While the specific spark of each protest has differed, their substance has been of like mind: Students are contending that their administrations have neglected an obligation to address bigotry, discrimination and intolerance, and specifically racism.
Opinion // Don’t Despair: Israel’s Not a Failure
American Jews shouldn’t be disappointed that Israel’s not a liberal wonderland.