Nothing Sacred

Fat Camp
In The Guardian yesterday, the columnist Nicholas Lezard noted a rarely mentioned flaw of movies set in Nazi death camps: The prisoners usually look well-fed. “How do you make the inmates look realistically thin?” he asks. His answer: “You don't. You can't starve your extras for four years to give them that so-sought-after degraded, emaciated look. But as anyone who has seen pictures of the camps knows, it is the skeletal appearance of...

The Filter

Words of Wisdom
Max Weinreich didn't want to publish the text of his opus, History of the Yiddish Language, without an equally massive set of footnotes, "even though no more than 10 people would consult them—and he knew all of them," as Ruth Wisse puts it. In the New York Post, Wisse writes that the book "rehabilitates" the language from comic triviality, ultimately arguing that "Yiddish is a repository of the Jewish way of life."

The Filter

Till Death Do Us Part
A "serious halachic dilemma" arose when a German man’s dying wish was "to be buried with his best friend, a bottle of vodka," according to the European Jewish Press. Jewish law forbids burying objects with the dead, but after rabbinic consultation, man and bottle were set to rest side by side.

The Filter

Unhappy Families
In What Happened to Anna K., Irina Reyn transplants Tolstoy's "Great Russian Soul" to a Jewish enclave in Queens, with an updated heroine who is "human, and wonderfully alive," according to the San Fransisco Chronicle. The Christian Science Monitor questions the book's contemporary social resonance, but concludes that Reyn succeeds in examining "how to forge an identity in an adopted country when your homeland has irrevocably changed."

The Filter

Out of Tune
In 1999, conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian cultural theorist Edward Said joined forces to offer what The Guardian calls a "happy consortium as a model for the coexistence of cultures in the Middle East": their mixed Israeli and Arab West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Yet, according to the review, each man's book on the project disappoints: Barenboim's Everything Is Connected is "an insubstantial volume...with a random sampling of interviews," while Said's posthumous essay collection Music at the Limits is "woefully deficient."

The Filter

Laughter and Tears
"If I was making fun of mental illness and I didn’t have it, it would be really tasteless," says British comedian Ruby Wax. "It’s the same rule that says you can make fun of being a Jew if you’re a Jew.” A child of Austrian-Jewish emigrés who's been fighting depression since childhood, Wax brings her latest show to the Edinburgh Fringe as part of a BBC-sponsored campaign for mental health.

The Filter

Halachic Law
"If you give a Jewish guy a ticket, it's very hard," worries new NYPD cadet Shmuel Tenenbaum, who's hoping for a post outside of his native Crown Heights. This is just one of many concerns facing the ten Orthodox Jews joining the force as part of the most observant class to date. The New York Post seems to have learned Yiddish for the occassion, reporting that the new, bagel-shmearing officers have successfully convinced their verklempt parents they ain't meshugana.

Nothing Sacred

Everyone Says They Love Him
Why do so many big-name critics lose their faculties when it comes to Woody Allen? For Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen’s latest half-baked effort, they’re swooning like schoolgirls—and not because it features Scarlett Johannson and Penélope Cruz getting it on. Andrew Sarris says Allen “has managed to astound me by coming up with one of the most felicitously written, edited, acted and directed romantic comedies of his entire career.” David Denby says the film...

OTHER RECENT FEATURES

More in Arts, Books, Life, Ideas

Subscribe to Nextbook

Email Newsletter
RSS
Podcasts

Most Emailed

#1 The Hard-Knock Life
An Orthodox Annie takes the frum world by storm

#2 Preparing the Dead
A burial society’s life lessons

#3 Wise We Were Not
I fought passionately for independence—without really knowing what it meant

Featured Comments

#1 "The statement that 'Franco' is name that 'that doesn't sound Jewish at all' is yet another example of Ashkenazi self-centeredness and ignorance of Sephardic and Mizrahi customs and culture. "

#2 "Many of the proper names in the Torah are puns or plays on words. Adam's name is based on the Hebrew word for dirt, which is the stuff of which he was made."

#3 "Thank you for this lovely, strange, moving poem...It captures beautifully a woman's lasting power for creation, right up to the end."

#4 "Perhaps [Weininger's work] is a kind mirror wherein you see only what you want of your own image."

#5 "No wonder when I was in Bombay a few years ago I felt at home; I've been wanting to go back ever since."