A Nobel Prize-winning German novelist—a former SS soldier, no less—accuses the state of Israel of seeking to exterminate an entire people, and the literary republic yawns. But when Israel bars its accuser from entering the country, because ex-Nazis have no place in the Jewish state, the cries of "bullying" and "censorship" nearly drown out the original accusation.
Antiquity washes away the immediacy of historical pain and injustice. Our ability to feel suffering is indexed directly to its epoch: the more remote, the more detached we are. Museums play on this—pander to this—and to our forgetfulness. History is softened, elided, or erased.
Libeskind’s Green Garden Tower, New York.
A look inside three of the twentieth century's most interesting careers in architecture: the world-renowned Israeli Moshe Safdie, on the verge of shutting down the office he opened in Jerusalem in 1970; the Polish-born, polarizing Daniel Libeskind, now at work on rebuilding New York's World Trade Center; and the mythic postwar master Louis Kahn.
Heschel ca. 1940.
Standing at Sinai, "All the people were seeing the thunder" (Exodus 20:15), seeing the sounds. The word "revelation" would be somewhat misleading, since nothing was unveiled: The mountain was wreathed in cloud and smoke.
After 60 years of publishing and recording, seventysomething Leonard Cohen has something else to say; and, lo and behold, the "Camp"—the Bergen-Belsen of the remembered newsreels of his childhood—comes up. He also gets the "Eye"—Jerusalem's Eye of the Needle—in there, a Jewish metaphor from the Talmud and the New Testament.
Of making Jewish music there is no end, but how many contemporary composers of distinguished work in this genre have been featured on From the Top, National Public Radio's program about exceptional young musicians? Jeremiah Klarman, age thirteen when he appeared on the NPR show, may be the sole exception. Now seventeen, with a demonstrated mastery of styles from classical to klezmer, and with chamber, orchestral, and pop compositions under his belt, Klarman has turned his lavish and protean talents to choral music. A premier of his latest work, the cantata Hallel, Shir v'Or ("Praise, Song, and Light"), drawing largely on well-known verses from the book of Psalms, took place in late December at Temple Emanuel in Newton, Mass. Performed by the Zamir Chorale of Boston under the direction of Joshua R. Jacobson, it culminates in a room-rocking, soul-lifting Halleluyah! for chorus and orchestra.
D.G. Myers
Third in a series on landmarks in American Jewish literature
In American literature, the critic Leslie Fiedler once quipped, nothing succeeds like failure. But among American Jewish writers, something like the reverse is closer to the truth: for many of their fictional characters, nothing fails so miserably as success. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), the first classic of Jewish fiction in America.
Aryeh Tepper
Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) was the poet of Jewish national rebirth and a leading light of cultural Zionism. To be more precise, he was a power station. Composing poems, writing essays, founding journals, raising up the sparks of Israel's past, Bialik became an essential source of energy for Jewish cultural revival.
Ruth R. Wisse
It was bound to happen. Abraham Sutzkever, born July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Lithuania, one of the great poets of the twentieth century and the last towering figure of modern Yiddish literature, died this Wednesday, January 20, in Tel Aviv, where he had lived since 1947. A descendant of rabbis, Sutzkever applied to the writing of poetry the standards of refinement that his ancestors had practiced in obedience to Jewish religious law. During World War II, when he was herded into the ghetto with the rest of Vilna Jewry, he determinedly continued composing, persuaded that "the angel of poetry" protects the creator of timeless—but only of truly timeless—work.
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