Новости за 03.05.2016

Tomorrow is Yom HaShoah in the United States, a day during which we commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. It’s a serious topic, of course, yet sometimes the way we remember or invoke tragedies evolves and shifts over time. Enter this week’s episode of TLV1’s StreetWise Hebrew podcast, where Guy Sharrett shares some fascinating everyday idioms and metaphors that have begun to take their place in the Israeli lexicon—all of which relate to the Hebrew word “sho’a.”

Jennifer Schuessler at the New York Times has just now, on April 29, reported the discovery of a major unknown work by Walt Whitman, Manly Health and Training, written in 1858—though some people may object to calling the unknown work “major,” given that Manly Health and Training represents hack journalism of a semi-reputable and decidedly minor sort. Manly Health and Training was a 13-part series on men’s health, for a forgotten newspaper called The New York Atlas, and was plundered partly from... Читать дальше...

If you’ve heard anything about the Tony nominations, released on Tuesday, it’s probably that Hamilton broke records today with 16 nominations in 13 categories, taking at least one slot in every category for which it had eligibility. This is both unsurprising, and just; Hamilton recently became the ninth-ever musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and it’s an emotional, exciting, intricately written work—a hip-hop-infused masterpiece of nuanced character development, exploration of sophisticated themes, and visual storytelling onstage. Читать дальше...

Not so long ago, we breathlessly reported that supermodel Bar Refaeli—the greatest sex symbol to come out of Israel since, um, the Judith (of the Bible)—is expecting a daughter with her businessman husband, Adi Ezra, this summer, thus following through on her promise to “raise a big Jewish family” of genetically superior superhumans who will populate the Holy Land for years to come. And she hasn’t let impending motherhood tone down her sexy image, or condemn her to, like, a career of making Hebrew-language commercials for... Читать дальше...

The importance of the Resistance in France during the World War II cannot be measured solely in terms of the military exploits of its member groups or by its contribution to the liberation of France. Its very existence testifies to a survival during the occupation of another France, a France that opposed the Vichy regime and rejected the official policy of collaboration with the Nazi occupier. French Jews—under a double jeopardy of anti-Semitic law (French and German), stripped of their possessions... Читать дальше...

Isolationism is as old as the Republic—ever since Thomas Jefferson laid down his “no-entangling alliances” doctrine and John Quincy Adams warned against going “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Later on,  war and weariness would trigger the reflex along partisan lines—Republicans after World War I, Democrats during Vietnam. Now, it is not left vs. right, but a bizarre alliance of both, intoning that old musical “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.”

In 2012, Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, wrote a piece for the leftist magazine New Statesman, describing his ideological coordinates. “I write regularly on Israel and the Middle East,” it begins, “but there is one word apparently central to the topic I use only rarely: Zionism. That is because the word has become so misunderstood, so freighted with excess baggage, that it has become all but impossible to deploy it without extensive explanation and qualification.”

All signs, unfortunately, are pointing to a Donald Trump victory in the Indiana primaries on Tuesday. I’ve had lots of trouble, to say the least, understanding Trump’s appeal—personal, political, and otherwise. I don’t understand why anybody would support an apparently sexist, racist, entitled, unintelligent, uninformed, fear-inducing, violence-encouraging person to make decisions as Leader of the Free World. And, besides, he’s not even a good businessman, contrary to what you may have enjoyed on TV. Читать дальше...