Culture

Review: Seth Tobocman's Understanding the Crash

Authors
June 17, 2010

How do you make the mortgage crisis and resulting Crash a great read? Get Seth Tobocman to set history to comix.

Get Him to the Theater on Time

June 16, 2010

The latest film from Judd Apatow’s camp awkwardly tackles the subject of same-sex romance, while raising interesting questions about its “brother” films’ treatment of ethnicity.

Poetry Review: Fair Creatures of an Hour

June 11, 2010

New poems by Lynn Levin concern themselves with the business of living

Twelve Bites of the Apple: Beth Grossman’s "All the Rest is Commentary"

May 28, 2010

“What is hateful to you, do not do to others.” Goldbard and Grossman offer twelve variations on this rule, in prose and art.

When Realism Was King: Posters of the Labor Movement

Authors
May 24, 2010

The posters of the American Labor movement were shaped by the Depression but owed much to shifts in the reproduction of art, especially political art.

Daughter of Iraq: An Excerpt

May 12, 2010

Middle Eastern Jews have their own aliyah stories, too. Israeli novelist Revital Shiri-Horowitz paints a portrait of an Iraqi woman planning her departure.

Beasts in the Jungle

May 6, 2010

The ways in which we’ve been taught to remember the Holocaust have made us indifferent to the tragedy. According to novelist Yann Martel, the only way to re-sensitize ourselves is to imagine how we might tell the story differently.

Music Is the Food of the Soul

May 3, 2010

In Christopher Nupen’s spare, inspirational film Everything Is a Present, the concert pianist Alice Sommer Herz explains how performing at Theresienstadt wasn’t playing for her supper, so much as playing AS her supper, a form of spiritual sustenance.

Bonaparte, the Entrepreneur

May 2, 2010

What if the Zionist movement failed to create a Jewish homeland? In a previously untranslated short story, its founder, Theodor Herzl, considers the consequences.

Yossi Avni-Levy: Israeli Diplomat, Gay Novelist

Authors
April 30, 2010

Diplomat Yossi Levy only recently came out of the closet as gay novelist Yossi Avni. Jo Ellen Green Kaiser talks to him about his new book, An Ode for Sins, the Holocaust, and the sexual politics of Yisrael Beiteinu.

The Meaning of Malcolm McLaren

April 28, 2010

Sorting through responses to the controversial figure’s death, the author realizes that McLaren’s Jewish childhood can help us make sense of his legacy.

My Hebrew is Poetry

April 22, 2010

Modern Hebrew poetry was originally conceived as a vehicle for secular Jewish liberalism. Its impact on Israel’s national language has been forgotten.

The Stamp

April 15, 2010

Don’t let the high rises fool you. Tel Aviv is every bit as complex and mythical as the great European capitals it aspires to rival. Indeed, in, Roy (Roee) Chen’s work, life inside the Mediterranean city is worthy of the best nineteenth-century Russian fiction.

We Can Make Music

April 15, 2010

A love song for musicians traveling around the world, doing our thing.

James Sturm's Market Day

Authors
April 14, 2010

In a thoughtful depiction of Jewish angst, comic artist James Sturm explains how commercial relations between Jews can be just as cruel as persecution by Gentiles.

A Tale of Two Karkadans: Music in Multicultural Europe

April 6, 2010

Although a German metal band and an Italian rapper of Tunisian descent seem to have only the name “Karkadan” in common, their co-existence provides the perfect opportunity to meditate on the future of European culture.

A Night Like Any Other: A Pesach Play

March 31, 2010

It’s rare to find one-act plays online, and rarer to find one about Pesach.

Forgiving Hannah Arendt

March 25, 2010

Hannah Arendt was one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century. A German Jew, she also loved - and eventually forgave - Martin Heidegger, for being a Nazi.

Cultural Shiva? What It Means To Mourn a Popular Musician

March 22, 2010

The death of rock musician Alex Chilton prompts the author to muse on the relationship between public ritual and private pain. Mass culture is usually thought of as a means of distracting us. But what if it helps us to connect with feelings we would otherwise deny?

Three Stories from Blue Has No South

March 10, 2010

Frequently compared to Borges and Kakfa, Alex Epstein is one of Israel’s best-regarded fiction writers. Zeek is proud to present three selections from his new collection of short stories, forthcoming this April from Clockroot Books.

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