Новости за 21.01.2016

Today, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign released an arresting new ad. It features no dialogue from the candidate himself, other than the obligatory “I’m Bernie Sanders and I approve this message” at the end. Instead, the one-minute spot captures scenes of everyday American life, while Simon and Garfunkel’s idealistic anthem “America” plays in the background. As the song moves to its refrain of “They’ve all come to look for America,” the camera pans over the crowds at Sanders’s rallies.

I was having drinks with a friend the other night, and he said to me: “Is it just me, or does it seem like the world has fallen into darkness?” I couldn’t help but agree with him. There’s just been so much terrible news: the fact that 2015 was the hottest year in history, boding ill for whatever ability to we have left to live more or less in our present biosphere; wells in Michigan are poisoning children, leaving many permanently disabled; you can’t go anywhere without having to talk about Making... Читать дальше...

The University of Victoria in British Columbia now has what is believed to be the world’s first endowed academic chair of transgender studies thanks to a $2 million donation by Chicago philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker via her foundation, the Chicago Tribune reported on Tuesday. Pritzker, a retired Army lieutenant colonel whose family launched the Hyatt Hotels Corporation in 1957, founded the Tawani Foundation in an effort to preserve military history and better the lives of military personnel, among other related causes. Читать дальше...

Earlier this month, the global consulting firm BDO completed its first-ever comprehensive survey of food waste in Israel. (Surprisingly for such a gluttonous age as ours, Israel is only the second country, after Australia, to commission such a report.) The results are grim: for a country of seven million people where 1.6 million reportedly live under the poverty line, the Jewish state wasted 1.3 million tons of edible food in 2015 alone. This number translates to NIS18 billion ($4.5 billion),... Читать дальше...

Last winter, I was a lonely Jew living in galut (Yiddish for “exile” or “diaspora”) outside Dallas, Texas, where I felt alienated from any and all aspects of Jewish life or culture, disconnected from my community and my heritage. That changed when a friend gave me a copy of Aaron Lansky’s book Outwitting History, which details the author’s efforts, beginning in the 1980s, to collect and preserve Yiddish literature—often languishing in dusty cellars and garages, if not thrown away altogether—and create the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst... Читать дальше...

Good on Paper, by Rachel Cantor, is an absent-minded professor of a novel: It has one foot in the real world—as real as it gets on the bourgeois-academic Upper West Side—and one in the clouds. That division between ideas and reality, literature and life, has been the engine of many comic novels, particularly Jewish ones—just think of Bellow’s Moses Herzog, who writes imaginary letters to philosophers while his marriage crumbles, or Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, whose sexual urges rebel against his carefully inculcated idealism. Читать дальше...

This week on Unorthodox: a truly surprising knock-knock joke from a 13-year-old Unorthodox fan.

As I write this, ISIS is hunting gay men to toss from the rooftops of Raqaa, and nearly 80 countries proscribe homosexuality. Yet for a 36-hour period earlier this week, the National LGBTQ Task Force chose to ally itself not with the one country in the Middle East that guarantees and protects the human rights of LGBTQ people, but with those who hang them from construction cranes.