17 Jan
Culture

Jerusalem Syndrome

by Sala Levin Matt Gross went to Jerusalem, and all he got was this lousy set of tefillin. This, more or less, was the takeaway from Gross's piece in the New York Times this Sunday, in which the paper's former Frugal Traveler took on the holiest city in the world. He says at the outset: "Of all the world's roughly 200 nations, there was only one...that I had absolutely zero interest in ever visiting: Israel." Well, okay. Naive assumptions led me to believe that travel writers didn't have a blacklist, and it seems deliberately petulant for even a self-described "deeply secular Jew" to disavow any interest in the Jewish state. But hey, better late than never, and Gross was on his way now. Gross, understandably, focuses primarily on the Old City, the hotspot of holy landmarks. He visits...

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14 Apr
Uncategorized

Shtetl Life Reexamined

By Symi Rom-Rymer A picture is worth a thousand words, so goes the old cliché.  But as Alana Newhouse’s recently published New York Times article on Roman Vishniac demonstrates, what that picture is actually saying is often more complicated than it seems. Her piece focuses on Vishniac’s “A Vanished World,” a pictorial representation of pre-World War II Jewish life in Eastern Europe.  Or at least, that’s how it was marketed and sold.  But through Newhouse’s piece, we come to learn that the photos used in the book showed only one part (the poor and the religious) of that world.  They did not, as Vishniac claimed, represent the totality of shtetl life.  Instead, these photos were taken so that the Joint Distribution Committee--a committee that worked on behalf of impoverished and persecuted Jews around the world--could fund-raise. The reality,...

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15 Mar
Uncategorized

The Jews of Modern Poland

By Symi Rom-Rymer The New York Times recently published a piece recently about a former Polish neo-Nazi who discovered his Jewish roots as an adult and is now ultra-Orthodox.  As he acknowledges in the article, “he was drawn to extremes.” Pawel’s (now Pinchas’) story is certainly engrossing.  Not only do we learn that he has Jewish roots, but that his grandparents, who are still living, are Jewish and hid their religion from him so that he would not exposed to anti-Semitism.  Moreover, his wife (also a former skinhead), also comes from a Jewish family and both of their families are from the same Jewish community.   His journey from skinhead to Orthodox Jew, then, tells both his personal story as well as that of contemporary Poland and how truly intertwined Jewish and Polish communities are just below the...

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14 Dec
Latest, Religion

How Long Can We Really Talk About Montana?

By Caroline Kessler I’ve realized that the world of writing about all things Jewish is small—or perhaps the powerful juggernaut that is the Internet just makes it feel that way. Case in point: the “hey-there-are-Jews-even-in-the-backwoods” piece in the New York Times that people can’t seem to stop talking about: the wide-eyed take on a bomb-sniffing dog that only understands Hebrew, but is trapped in the flatlands of Montana. This piece has been ripped apart in more places than I want to count (but did, as I put off my final exams). So, in the spirit of tackling Jewish issues before the rest of the snarkier, faster blogging world gets to them, I want to point out another “relevant” piece in our favorite New York paper. Slightly hidden in their ‘N.Y. / Region’ section (that I can’t imagine...

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25 Jun
Latest, Misc

Jailhouse Hora

By Michelle Albert These days, to have a truly memorable bar mitzvah, it has to be somewhere special. Like jail. According to the New York Times, New York City's Department of Investigation is pursuing an inquiry into how an inmate held in a jail in Lower Manhattan could have arranged a bar mitzvah party for his son last year. The party, held in the gymnasium of the Manhattan Detention Complex, featuring Orthodox singer Yaakov Shwekey as the night's entertainment, boasted 60 guests and lasted six hours. It seems a good time was had by all. The problem, according to the City, is that the party featured real silverware, including metal knives (not allowed in jail), and that the guests brought their cellphones with them (also not allowed). The city is also flummoxed at how Tuvia Stern, the inmate...

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