Новости за 20.11.2017

Earlier this summer, Dean Issacharoff, the spokesman of Breaking the Silence—an Israeli left-wing NGO dedicated to collecting testimonies from IDF soldiers who had allegedly abused Palestinians—led a group of tourist on a tour of Hebron. It was the same kind of well-rehearsed sortie that had inspired Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon to partner with the organization and release a controversial collection of essays about Israeli misdeeds great and small. But on that particular day, Issacharoff... Читать дальше...

Last week, Tablet reported that The New School will host a panel on anti-Semitism featuring Linda Sarsour, who is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan and who has argued that anti-Semitism is different from Islamophobia “because it’s not systemic, and Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace, which enthusiastically supports convicted terrorists. Reached for comment, the university suggested that Tablet and the Anti-Defamation League, which strongly condemned the panel, organize a separate event... Читать дальше...

Diaspora, a new off-Broadway play about Masada, spans millennia. It vacillates across time in the iconic Israeli fortress, from American college students on Birthright to ancient separatists gradually losing footing against the Romans. The residents of Masada, particularly the women, question their leader’s assurances that God will deliver them. The Birthright students question why they’re on the trip, and what it means to be Jewish, both independent of Israel and in the face of huge political controversy. Читать дальше...

The really frightening thing about Charles Manson was not so much his own murderousness (except from the standpoint of the people being murdered, of course), nor his hold over his insane Family, the cult murderers, but his acceptability and even his appeal to other people, the sane and high-minded and groovy bystanders. So far as I know, I never met Manson or any of the members of the Family, though I inhabited the same Haight-Ashbury as them for a couple of months of the Summer of Love and must surely have shared a sidewalk or two... Читать дальше...

Let’s say you drive a lot and you need some tool to help you find your way around. Most of us, of course, are free to enjoy smartphone applications like Waze, which use GPS technology to get us anywhere we need to go fast. But what are those of us who are Gur Hasids to do? Like many in the Haredi world, their community views smartphones as an abomination, a gateway to all the filth of the world wide web. How, then, to enjoy modernity’s useful tricks without risking its corruptions?

Let’s say you drive a lot and you need some tool to help you find your way around. Most of us, of course, are free to enjoy smartphone applications like Waze, which use GPS technology to get us anywhere we need to go fast. But what are those of us who are Gur hassids to do? Like many in the haredi world, their community views smartphones as an abomination, a gateway to all the filth of the world wide web. How, then, to enjoy modernity’s useful tricks without risking its corruptions?

The inimitable Nick Cave played Tel Aviv last night, a concert that, like any other show by the most soulful artist working today, was shattering and sublime. Just as moving, however, was Cave’s pre-concert press conference, in which he shared his reason for returning to the Holy Land after a two-decade absence.

What the world really needs is a study of dumb Jews, Peter Gay remarked while disparaging a book about how “the Jewish genius” had, so the author claimed, invented modernity. Eddy Portnoy in Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories From the Yiddish Press has come along to answer Gay’s request. Bad Rabbi explores the sensational offerings of the Yiddish newspapers in both America and Eastern Europe, which featured, Portnoy says, “multitudes of mediocre Jews, many of whom lived on the verge of modernity... Читать дальше...

While sitting by the swimming pool at the stunning Elma Arts Complex Luxury Hotel, high up on Mount Carmel and overlooking the Mediterranean, I spied a promising eggplant dish whisked by in a server’s hand. Always on the search for good eggplant recipes—especially in Israel, the epicenter of eggplant, because the climate is perfect for its cultivation—I asked the server to bring that dish for lunch. It arrived roasted, in the shape of an accordion, similar to that of the hotel-music complex, which... Читать дальше...

We could certainly use some alternatives to social reality right now, and what better place to find them than in books? But is Benjamin Markovits’ You Don’t Have to Live Like This the great social-realist-quasi-socialist-alternative-community novel of our times? Did I miss it?