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[ . . . ] It seems to me we are ready to rethink ourselves in America now; to preserve ourselves by a new culture-making.
Now you will say that this is a vast and stupid contradiction following all I…
A woman named Bella stayed behind to speak to me. Her hair was carefully waved, touched with streaks of blond, her eyes round and blue. She was not one of the shapeless old, but kept waist, hips, and…
I rang up to tell you that I’m your tenant Cohen. I say I’m your tenant, Cohen. I ain’t goin’, I’m stoppin’ here. I’m your tenant Coh—Not lieutenant Cohen. I vant to tell you thet last night the vind…
I remember the moment when it dawned on me that my father did not impress the world at large as a powerful figure. We were at a camera store on the Plaza—a faux-Andalusian shopping district that…
for Aaron Lebedeff (1873–1960), performer on the Yiddish stage
Bewildering clarity of tongues:
names you never heard, food
you never ate, a wild dance
you never learned, light hanging
in the sky…
The very lack of a self-contained territory that has so far disqualified the study of Yiddish from NDEA [the National Defense Education Act] support endows Ashkenazic Jewry with exemplary value for a…
What does it mean to study women’s religion? How are we to define our subject matter? How are we to understand the relationship of the history of women’s religious life and practice to the history of…
Modern Yiddish literature focuses upon the shtetl during its last tremor of self-awareness, the historical moment when it is still coherent and self-contained but already…
Most of the stories in this collection are modern; a few are ancient. They were written in Hebrew, German, Yiddish, Russian and English, yet all are, to a discerning eye, very clearly Jewish. [ . . .…
[ . . . ] Modern Jewish humor grows from the tension of having to reconcile a belief as absolute as Elijah’s with an experience of failure as absolute as that of the priests of Baal…