Earlier this week, I blogged about Vivian Gornick’s recent assertion that “Jewish writing is over.” Gornick was suggesting that the only worthwhile Jewish literature was that which dealt with the experience of first and second generation American Jews. While I took serious issue with this position, and more importantly, the way she expressed it, there [...]

This was announced a few months ago, and now a 6-page preview is up. But I haven’t seen it making headlines, aside from a single article: Magneto, whose pre-spandex name was Erik Lensherr, is a Holocaust survivor, which is going to be explicitly documented for the first time in a new miniseries, coming from Marvel [...]

Ali Waked reports that the Hamas raid on the Hilles clan compound marks the completion of the June 2007 revolution, as Hamas no longer has “any rivals and certainly not any armed pockets of resistance.” (YNet) But Khaled Abu Toameh says, “Hamas has one more challenge to face: the notorious Dughmush clan, also based in [...]

Yesterday, I convinced my beneficent editor to let me out early in order to go to a friend’s son’s upsheren — the ritual ceremony of cutting a child’s hair for the first time at the age of 3. As far as Jewish rituals go, it’s not one of the big guys, certainly not comparable to [...]

Music professor Francesco Lotoro talks about collecting more than 4,000 pieces composed in Nazi concentration camps. Beth Am Israel has collected sound files of synagogue melodies, for listening or downloading. Their site features Friday night, Saturday morning, and additional Jewish tunes. Cantors face the challenge of declining interest in nusah: Congregants don’t want “traditional liturgical [...]

A “large number of lower-level Hamas activists have recently been released from Israeli jails after serving sentences of about five years for relatively minor intifada-related crimes.â€? The fear is that they will set up terror cells in the West Bank to uses terrorism techniques they learned in jail. (Ha’Aretz) Senior IDF officers are “reportedly furious [...]

Wikipedia bouncing is one of my favorite things to do. If we use “surfing” to describe crawling the web, just think of this as skating: start off researching an article, then click on a hotlink that you’re distracted by, followed by another. Before long, you’re six thousand degrees from where you started. As in, from [...]

Ever since Jennifer 8 Lee wrote about the reemergence of the egg cream earlier this month in The New York Times, it’s seems everyone is going crazy over the drink, which contains no egg or cream. The Second Avenue Deli provides a shot-sized version to all of its customers at the end of the meal. [...]

Jonathan Spyer explains why Syria is in no particular hurry to reach a deal with Israel. (Jerusalem Post) Zvi Bar’el makes the case that “the Israeli-Syrian conflict will need to be given priority over any other track.” (Ha’aretz) Would peace with Syria make it possible to run a water pipeline from Turkey, through Syria to [...]

Vivian Gornick’s forthcoming book The Men in My Life includes an essay called “Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and the End of the Jew as Metaphor” — which was first delivered as a lecture at Harvard earlier this year. In some ways, the essay is — apparently — an updated version of her “Why Do These [...]