Новости за 20.06.2017

This past week, I received an expected fan note—from the internet’s neo-Nazis. Now, the alt-right is very familiar with my work.

Otto Warmbier, an American student at the University of Virginia—who was active in Hillel and who went on Birthright, where he received a Hebrew name—died yesterday after being arrested and tortured by North Korea. You’d think that the cluster of handsomely funded Jewish organizations that fly the banner of promoting and protecting Jewish life in America and abroad would notice and acknowledge Warmbier’s murder. So far, though, American Jewish officialdom has been deafeningly silent.

One of the best concerts I’ve been to in recent years was my cousin Sammy’s wedding in London last winter, when an eight-piece band blazed through one Hebrew-language banger after another for a solid three hours. Jewish music can be jammy and operatic and punk rock all at the same time, yet many of us are only confronted with the true extent of its awesomeness at the occasional simcha or shul event or while, say, riding an Israeli inter-city bus. This is a shame, because Jewish music is as surprising... Читать дальше...

In Beccar, a beachy residential neighborhood north of Buenos Aires, Argentine police, working together with Interpol, discovered an incredible trove of Nazi-era artifacts in the home of an unidentified collector. The raid, which occurred on June 8, only resulted in a discovery because, as the AP reported, “a large bookshelf caught their attention and behind it agents found a hidden passageway to a room filled with Nazi imagery.”

One hundred years on, the American Zionist movement is still celebrating and glorifying the Balfour Declaration. We teach about it in Hebrew schools as a landmark achievement and reference it in debates as an argument for Israel’s legitimacy. We heaved a sigh of relief when the British government officially rejected a petition urging it to apologize for the 1917 letter.

“The whole world is a very narrow bridge … gesher tzar me’od,” whispered David Shapiro, without a hint of irony—near-whispered it, cradling the fragile melody, nearly drowned out by the sounds of the top-hits radio station blaring in a hotel lobby, where we sat, enveloped by a darkening San Francisco. On another occasion, I’d burst out laughing or even cringe thinking of this tune, worn down by endless summer-camp invocations, but David Shapiro—influential American poet and critic—in that one moment... Читать дальше...

This is a sponsored post on behalf of Yale University Press and its Jewish Lives series.

This is a sponsored post on behalf of Yale University Press and its Jewish Lives series.

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