It’s not a secret that I’m a huge fan of the band Stereo Sinai. There are a lot of folks appropriating Jewish songs and making their own versions, but Alan and Miriam manage to be consistently creative, whimsical, and amazingly danceable, dabbling in everything from tribal rhythms to folk-pop to ’80s new wave.
Their newest track, […]

Our friend Joshua Henkin, whose NYTimes notable book Matrimony just came out in paperback, is guest blogging over at The Elegant Variation today and showing that James Wood isn’t the only one who knows how fiction works.
Most interesting so far is a sneak peek at Josh’s novel in progress, which apparently offended some folks at […]

I was internetless in the mountains for a bit, so I missed the whole furious flurry about how Magneto might be Jewish, how The Thing of the Fantastic Four is Jewish, and how Superman is probably not Jewish (but Kryptonian religion bears more than a passing resemblance to the one documented on this […]

A friend sent me the following hilarity…

Okay, remember when we learned about the Jewish heritage of various comic-book characters yesterday? Now, we’re going to see it in action.

Okay, admittedly, this is a Friday thing. But, hey, it’s a Friday. And any comic that has the line “Let my people go, ya mook!” is worthy of being included in *my* canon.

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 is […]

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 […]

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 music but […]

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.
Eater went […]

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 […]