Новости за 29.11.2016

It’s raining today in New York. And when I woke up, feeling like a heavy lump of a human being, I considered staying in bed. And then I looked at my phone, like the machine that I am, and checked Twitter and my email and other information providers, and that information slowly began to lay punches onto my right cheek. One by one. Slow, hard fists to my face. Bam: neo-Nazis here. Bam: neo-Nazis there. Bam: Donald Trump said this. Bam: the world is freaking out. Bam: stay in bed, there’s nothing out there for you but hate... Читать дальше...

I’ve been excited about Natalie Portman’s star turn as Jackie Kennedy in the upcoming biopic Jackie since, well, since I heard about it, which, like so many things pre-election, has begun to feel a little like the opening scene at the barbecue in Gone With the Wind: before we understood that our way of life was based on lies or had any ability to fathom the horrors to come. (We’re still kind of there, by the way, albeit after the barbecue, where Scarlett weeps pathetically at her hasty pre-War... Читать дальше...

OK, look, I’ll admit it up front: Maybe the headline here is a bit misleading. Because on Sunday, when thousands of Chabad emissaries gathered outside Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, they didn’t exactly knock it completely out of the park; it was more of a legged-out triple. There’s movement happening all over the place and, well, they forgot to rock Rae Sremmurd’s jam “Black Beatles,” which would have made it truly Internet offish.

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

For years, I worked above a kosher grocery store, and the men there davened in a large meat freezer in the back. At sunset during the winter months, I could expect a knock on my office door. “We need you for a minyan—in the freezer.”

On Monday a German federal judge denied an appearl from Oskar Groening, a former Nazi guard who was convicted in July on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. In April, when the trial began, Groening, who was a bookkeeper at Auschwitz, said, “It is beyond question that I am morally complicit. This moral guilt I acknowledge here, before the victims, with regret and humility.”