Новости за 22.05.2018

Look, I’m sure scholar Lillian Faderman’s new book, Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death is very nice. Very smart. But does it have giant, brilliantly colored illustrations of a drag queen with a teeny purse, whorls of rainbow fabric, a surfer dude with a rainbow board, and a really cute schnauzer? I bet not.

These days, having strong feelings about politics is almost a survival skill, particularly for those of us charged with shedding light on the culture and its machinations. A conversation about ideas, sharp and engaging, is all we can hope for, even—or particularly—when we don’t agree with the opinions being promoted. And we have few resources as meaningful as the study of history, which provides us with a fuller and more nuanced understanding of our current and peculiar moment in time.

The Polish town of Oswiecim means very different things depending on which language you’re speaking. Osphitzin, the town’s Yiddish name, was a place where for 400 years Jews lived and worked and worshipped. But most Jews today likely only know it by its German translation: Auschwitz—the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camps were built just outside the Polish town, and nearly all the Jews of Oshpitzin were murdered there.

Viewers of comedian Sanne Wallis deVries’s show on Holland’s public broadcasting network were treated to a special surprise: An actress dressed as Netta Barzilai, the Israeli singer who had won the Eurovision song contest earlier this month, took the stage to perform a parody of Barzilai’s hit, “Toy.” With images of rioting Palestinians playing on giant screens behind her, the actress delivered lyrics that took little trouble to steer clear of hate speech.

“Every revolution in poetry is apt to be … a return to common speech,” wrote T. S. Eliot in his essay “The Music of Poetry.” Indeed, the spikes of poetry’s popularity, in our time, have been directly related to poets’ attempts to bring poetry back to the masses—and to speak, again, the vernacular language of the street. This happened in T. S. Eliot’s days with the advent of Modernism. It happened again with the Beats in the 1950s. Bob Dylan single-handedly brought on another wave with his poetic lyrics in the 1960s. Читать дальше...

“Without power you are dead in the world,” said Dan Meridor, former deputy prime minister and minister of intelligence and atomic energy of the State of Israel, to a worldwide assembly at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center recently. “Nobody learned this more than the Jews.”