Новости за 15.11.2016

Last Sunday, President Obama warned us that Donald Trump couldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. A week later, not only do we know that Trump will get those codes, but he’s shown us who he’d like to guide him in crises that might require their use. Stephen Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, has been tapped as the new president’s Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor.

Our world is full of lovely things: naps, sweet carbohydrates, falling in love, shelter, pets, friends, bubblegum, bubble baths. Our world is also full of ugly things, like swastikas and the people who graffiti them onto property and then run away to a safe space in which they can hide their spray paint cans and find Internet forums that coddle and stoke their hatred of Jews. During Week 1 of Trump’s America, the ugliness has seeped in: swastikas have been popping up all over the land, from Washington State to right here in New York City... Читать дальше...

This past shabbat, I was originally supposed to give a talk at my local synagogue about the election results. Instead, I spent the weekend with Muslim leaders from across America. I’d previously been asked by the Shalom Hartman Institute to address their Muslim Leadership Initiative retreat on Sunday. But after Trump’s surprise victory, they requested that I join them for the entire weekend—and I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate and important place to spend the first shabbat after Trump’s election. Читать дальше...

When I saw the reports of swastikas drawn outside dorm rooms at The New School this week, I shared in the disgust and disbelief that this could happen here in New York—in this city, at the school where I’m a student. Then I felt what I always feel whenever some coward uses a swastika to deface property or scare a population: anger. Anger that all it took was one lunatic to completely change the meaning of an ancient and pure symbol from my religion when he decided it would be the center of his hate campaign. Читать дальше...

“O gather up the brokenness / And bring it to me now / The fragrance of those promises / You never dared to vow.” So begins one of Leonard Cohen’s most extraordinary kabbalistic songs, “Come Healing,” a poem that is prayer in its purest distillation, a prayer clothed in quintessential nakedness, an anthem that celebrates and laments the wholehearted fragmentariness of the human condition, the brokenness of the promises one never dared to vow. Why is this so? What is a promise that one does not dare to vow... Читать дальше...

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

The New York Times’ assessment of Professor Yaffa Eliach, the elegant doyen of Holocaust research who passed away at the age of 79, was that she “Captured Faces of the Holocaust.” The headline recognized Eliach’s towering photographic exhibition of her childhood village Eishyshok, which has been on permanent display at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington since the Museum opened in 1993. What it missed was that we have lost one of our greatest storytellers of the Holocaust.

When I bring up the history of Jews in comics in conversation, I generally receive two polar-opposite responses: a complete lack of knowledge about this connection, or a fervent grip on the specific lore about how a ragtag group of first-generation Americans created an art form from the dust. Stan Lee! Jack Kirby! Will Eisner! Jewish comic book fans cling to these names as a reminder that one of the most enduring popular forms of entertainment had Jewish patriarchs. I know I have.