Новости за 15.06.2017

Sandy Koufax is the most legendary Jewish athlete of all time. Over a five-year explosion of dominance, the hard-throwing southpaw achieved true greatness—an amorphous term whose lines become defined when considering Koufax’s decision to sit out Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because of Yom Kippur. Koufax’s acknowledgement that some things are just more important than baseball still resonates—a half-century later. The High Holiday no-show now overshadows Koufax’s Game 7 gem against the Twins to clinch the series. Читать дальше...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: some maniac picks up a weapon and slaughters innocent people. He hardly bothers concealing his motives—his ideology is there for anyone who bothers checking out his Facebook profile to see. And yet, no sooner are the wounded rushed to the emergency room than the lion’s share of our media, in contradiction of all observable reality, offer a very different story: Ideology had nothing to do with it, and if you’re looking for someone to blame, blame the victim. Читать дальше...

A recent New York Times feature showed the latest fashion trend: dresses that a woman would wear because she chose to be covered up. There was a photo of a long-sleeved striped shirtdress, with a simple collar and a hem that grazed the mid-calf. You wouldn’t blink if you saw an Orthodox Jewish woman—like me—crossing the street in it.

We reached out to Howard Jacobson, winner of the 2010 Man Booker prize (The Finkler Question), for his thoughts on David Grossman winning the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his novel, A Horse Walks Into a Bar.

John Singer Sargent’s prized 1896 portrait of Lady Adele Meyer and her children (Elsie Charlotte and Frank Cecil), which has been shown off and on at the Jewish Museum in New York, greets us with the image of a graying, 41-year-old, wealthy English patron of the opera, Lady Meyer, decked out in a pink satin and organdy dress. Her pale face is dappled with cosmetics and her dewy Drew Barrymore-ish eyes and lips are hypnotic and compelling. Her plunging neckline does not reveal cleavage, but the... Читать дальше...

This week on Unorthodox, we recorded a special crossover episode with Lexicon Valley, the podcast hosted by linguist John McWhorter. John was a guest on our show in December 2016, and when we weren’t interrupting him, we were discussing things like the word ‘like’ and his latest book, Talking Back, Talking Black. We sat down with him again for an in-depth conversation about whether there’s such a thing as Jewish English, the beauty of yeshivish, and, of course, the dinner scene from Annie Hall.

Linda Sarsour is a progressive-media darling. One of Essence magazine’s “Woke 100 Women,” Sarsour was named a leader of the Women’s March that followed President Donald Trump’s inauguration, despite declaring that “nothing is creepier than Zionism”—though her wish to “take away” the “vagina” of clitoridectomy victim and human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, praise for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, upholding Saudi Arabia as a bastion of women’s lib, embrace of the terrorist murderer Rasmea Odeh... Читать дальше...

Israeli author David Grossman has won the prestigious 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar. In his review of the book for Tablet, David Mikics, wrote that the novel, which centers on a stand-up comic who reveals to a crowd a traumatic moment in his childhood, “promise[d] to give a new jolt to [Grossman’s] career.”

When I entered the sweaty dance studio at Queens College, an instructor was yelling into a mic. “Ooh-pah!” he said to what appeared to be a mostly over-50 crowd. “Start with right: Right and left and one and back and one and back… Up your left hand!”