Five years ago, President George W. Bush set into law Jewish American Heritage Month that is now observed and celebrated every May in the U.S. According to the government website, http://jewishheritagemonth.gov: The month of May was chosen due to the highly successful celebration of the 350th Anniversary of American Jewish
The idea of the ineffable in architecture was first developed at Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Cathedral; to many, it is the ultimate symbol of religion’s representation in modernist architecture. Ronchamp’s undulating and unregulated windows and walls address the emotional elements of religious experience. Concrete is molded and shaped to form almost
Yale University’s Terry Lectures began in 1905 with a grant from Dwight H. Terry. Intended to bridge ideas of religion with developing modern science and philosophy, the deed of gift declares that “the object of this foundation is not the promotion of scientific investigation and discovery, but rather the assimilation
Accompanying “Five Poems from Kabbalah”, published in the spring issue of The Paris Review, is an online interview with translator, Peter Cole. His forthcoming book of translations from Hebrew, The Poetry of Kabbalah, will be published next year by YUP as part of the Margellos World Republic of Letters series.
Baseball season is upon us and Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One ,“a wonderful book”, according to the New York Daily News, is the newest addition to YUP’s Jewish Lives series, masterfully written by New York Times bestselling author, Mark Kurlansky. Matters of personal choice easily
No image of prerevolutionary Russian Jewish life is more iconic than the fiddler on the roof. But in the half century before 1917, Jewish musicians were actually descending from their shtetl roofs and streaming in dazzling numbers to Russia’s new classical conservatories. At a time of both rising anti-Semitism and
Janet Malcolm’s feature interview, titled “The Art of Nonfiction,” in the new issue of the Paris Review is only the fourth nonfiction interview in the publication’s history. She discusses with Katie Roiphe her career as a journalist, the relationships to her subjects, and the presence of court cases and trials
Acclaimed journalist Janet Malcolm’s new book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial, is about to publish later this month. Malcolm’s brilliant,compulsively readable coverage of the sensational murder trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, a beautiful doctor from the Bucharin-Jewish community in Forest Hills, who allegedly hired a hit man to kill her husband, dominated
On February 7, 1898, French writer Émile Zola was brought to trial for libel in his publication of “J’Accuse” in L’Aurore, a daily, leftist paper in Paris. His indictment of the French military’s treatment of the Drefyus Affair catapulted the anti-Semitic, pro-nationalist conspiracy to international recognition. The sympathetic camp of