Новости за 16.09.2015

On Tuesday, Malcolm Turnbull was sworn in at the Government House in Canberra as the 29th Prime Minister of Australia, the country’s fourth since 2013. Turnbull defeated Tony Abbott in a “sudden and extraordinary” ballot by the Liberal party lawmakers, reported The Australian. The former communications minister Turnbull bested Abbott in a vote of 54 to 44.

Are you familiar with Letters of Note? It’s a gorgeous coffee table book based on a blog of the same name by British writer Shaun Usher, who has a knack for finding weird, lovely, moving, important, and funny letters written throughout history by famous people and not-famous people. And now there’s a companion volume, Lists of Note, from Chronicle Books, also based on an Usher blog, which features lists compiled by everyone from a 9th-century Tibetan monk, to Albert Einstein, Julia Child, Tina Fey, and Roald Dahl. Читать дальше...

During World War I, Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, the fifth leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, put thousands upon thousands of books, documents, and other materials—the veritable organizational and spiritual soul of the group’s history, which began in Russia in 1775—into storage. This library, or the “Schneerson collection,” contained over 12,000 books and 25,000 handwritten manuscripts. In 2013, Tablet contributor Avital Chizik, who traveled to Russia to report on this diplomatic saga... Читать дальше...

Poet and writer Rita Gabis grew up surrounded by grandparents with accents—Russian, Yiddish, Lithuanian. That makes it sound like a familiar Jewish immigrant tale, but it was far from that. While Gabis’s father came from a family of Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States well before WWII, her mother was born in Lithuania. […]

Poet and writer Rita Gabis grew up surrounded by grandparents with accents—Russian, Yiddish, Lithuanian. That makes it sound like a familiar Jewish immigrant tale, but it was far from that. While Gabis’s father came from a family of Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States well before WWII, her mother was born in Lithuania. She and her family emigrated in the 1950s. And they were Catholic.

Modernist Yiddish poet Yitskhok Berliner was born in Łódź, Poland in 1899. He immigrated to Mexico in 1923. He sold images of saints for a living. Berliner’s best-known poetic subjects were the destitute and forgotten people of Mexico City’s alleyways. The detailed, ethnographic language of Berliner’s speaker is also an expressionist voice in spiritual crisis. He is a tormented, simple Jew who—having become European exactly as he departed the continent for Mexico—reluctantly improvised a persona... Читать дальше...

As a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis approaches the Israeli-Jordanian border, the knotted tassels of their Jewish prayer shawls are discreetly disappeared inside their trousers, out of sight. Jalabiyas, loose robes traditionally worn by Arabs, are swiftly whipped out of a bag and pulled over the shirt and trousers. Palestinian keffiyehs follow, carefully draped around the shoulders like a cape.

By mid-summer, weeds had taken over my community garden plot in Northwest Washington, D.C. Two sides of my fence had come down.