Новости за 25.09.2015

Dressed in a tux, Jerry Springer, the king of trashy television, celebrated his show’s silver jubilee on Monday. That’s 25 years of paternity tests, adult babies, kung fu hillbillies, baby mamas, bronies (men who dress as ponies), cat fights, and sibling love triangles. To commemorate the occasion, Destiny the Stripper, sporting mile-high stilettos, emptied two bottles of champagne over herself while shimmying in a bathtub. “Here’s to 25 years, Jerry,” she said, doused in alcohol. Meanwhile, a revved-up audience chanted “Jerry... Читать дальше...

Days before Sukkot, as it sat temporarily lodged in the garden of Invisible Dog Gallery, an art space in Brooklyn, New York, spectators were marveling at a magnificent multi-hued sculpture—a construction of dibond (an aluminum concoction), vinyl and wood, complete with a prismatic bodice and spliced edges. It stood eight-and-a-half-feet tall, its dimensions stretching up like a Manhattan high-rise.

It’s been a bad couple months for the BDS movement.

First, it was raked over the coals internationally for its attempt to ban American-Jewish singer Matisyahu from a Spanish festival. Then, after Iceland’s capital Reykjavik adopted a boycott of all Israeli products last week, its mayor promptly backtracked and apologized after the move was condemned by the country’s own prime minister as “absurd.” This week, another BDS initiative backfired, when the movement’s most openly anti-Semitic... Читать дальше...

And you shall take for yourselves on the first day [of Sukkot] the fruit of beautiful trees [i.e., citron = etrog], branches of palm trees [lulav], and boughs of leafy trees [myrtle = hadasim], and willows of the brook [aravot], and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.

This comic strip has been reprinted with permission from Atlas Obscura. View the entire “Places You Can No Longer Go” series on Atlas Obscura here.

Wanting to get down some words in honor of the luminous poet C.K. Williams, who died in Princeton on Sept. 20, aged 78, I started through my collection of his books, turning first, understandably, to one of the more recent, a thin 2012 volume titled Writers Writing Dying. The first poem is called “Whacked,” and it begins:

To witness how precious the mitzvah of Etrog is to the Jewish people one need only visit Meah Shearim between Elul and Sukkot. That neighborhood, which is like a withered plant all year long, becomes a verdant pleasure garden in that season, with stores full of etrogs, lulavs, and hadasim. Jews from all over Jerusalem crowd into those stores, inspecting the etrogs, lulavs, and hadasim, or sharing learned insights about them. Even the elderly, who never exit their own doorposts all year long, either... Читать дальше...