Showing Results 1 - 9 of 9
Mar Abramowitz did not attend services in our temple. With a dozen or so other Ashkenazi refugees from Eastern Europe he worshiped in a tiny downtown loft that was said, by those who had never been…
[ . . . ] Similarly, the Russian Jews use the traditional rhyming couplet in those verses that chronicle a historical event or inculcate an ethical truth. The real folksongs, however, are set to music…
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…
[ . . . ] 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…
There’s a marvelous story by Eduardo Stilman about a silver samovar. It caressingly describes the prodigious object—its polished ebony handles, finely carved arabesques, mischievously-turned spigot…
[ . . . V]iewed from the broad historic perspective, it is not at all surprising that American Jewry has not yet produced those great cultural achievements for which we are all…
2. What was it that made for the peculiar position of the Jews in the Middle Ages and later, until emancipation came along? It was the ghetto, we are told and told again, which was at the root of…
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. [ . . .…
Even in the narrative prose written by native Hebrew speakers towards the end of the 1940s, writers who hardly knew any foreign language and who were assuming positions at the center of the literary…