Новости за 13.12.2016

Remarks written for Leonard Cohen’s memorial service at Ohr HaTorah Synagogue in Mar Vista, California on Dec. 11, 2016.

As if 2016 hasn’t been surreal enough, Christmas and Hanukkah coincide this year. Taking notice of the holiday mash-up are Jamie Elman and Eli Batalion, the boychiks over at YidLife Crisis, a Yiddish-language webseries that follows the shenanigans (or rather, mishegas), of two bilingual, liberal Jews with a penchant for merriment.

Cadillac caused a stir this week when a casting service put out a request on behalf of the American luxury brand looking to fill the role of an “alt-right (neo-nazi)” in a new commercial. Cadillac denied it had ever authorized the notice and condemned it, while the casting company took responsibility, saying that it had been issued by mistake. Regardless of who did what, the idea had to have been hatched somewhere and by someone, which reveals something far more troubling than a mere streak of... Читать дальше...

Two weeks have passed since a fire destroyed Yoram Raanan’s studio—and his life’s work—but the U.S.-born Israeli painter refuses to succumb to despair. “There is a lot of negative but I’m not looking at it,” Raanan said of that fateful night. “I’m only looking at the positive.”

Anti-Semitism exists because people are naturally afraid of ghosts: the Jews in exile are a “ghostlike apparition of a living corpse,” and so the widespread “fear of the Jewish ghost” is a natural consequence of their statelessness, explained Leon Pinsker, who made this disturbing argument in his 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation. The human fear of ghosts renders anti-Semitism—or Judeophobia, as he called it—a hereditary and incurable “psychic aberration” common to the whole of mankind. It is impossible to combat this superstitious prejudice... Читать дальше...

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

Is there a little bit of Andrew Jackson in Trump? Stephen Bannon has said there is, and so has Rudolph Giuliani, and likewise any number of journalists, and the seeming unanimity has elevated the claim into the cliché of the hour. The cliché is wrong, however. And it is triply unfortunate. Historically it is an error. Politically it is an error. It makes Trump appear to be merely one more colorful character from ancient American political tradition, when he is, in fact, something new. And politically it is an error in still another way. Читать дальше...

Amy Schumer: comedy superstar, bestselling author, outspoken feminist, gun control crusader, and now… Barbie?  That’s the news from Hollywood, anyway, where Schumer is in talks to portray the iconic symbol of American womanhood (and invented by a Jew!) in a new live-action project from Sony.