Goodnight, Vienna

 

The Jews of Vienna did not merely understand the world: they took Marx's point and changed it, too. From Freud's psychoanalysis to Wittgenstein's philosophy, from Mahler's music to Herzl's Zionism, they made a unique contribution to modernity.

Fin-de-Siècle Vienna  Carl Schorske,  Vintage Books.  On Freud and his compatriots, who made the city dazzling at the turn of the 20th century.  SAVE

Hitler Takes Austria  TheHistoryTV.  Vienna's citizens welcome the unification of Austria with Germany in the Anschluss of 1938. (Video)  SAVE

SAVE "Goodnight, Vienna"

The Evil Inclination

 

The yetzer hara, usually translated "evil impulse," is an elusive rabbinic concept. The words derive from God's observation in Genesis 8:21 (paralleled earlier in 6:5) that "the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth."

Evil Urge  Amit Gevaryahu,  Talmud Blog.  A new work tackles one of the most entrenched myths in the academic study of Jewish sources: namely, that Judaism has historically been a sex-positive religion.  SAVE

Bar Mitzvah and Yetzer Hatov  Jeffrey Spitzer,  My Jewish Learning.  In rabbinic texts, the distinction between childhood and young adulthood is the birth of the good inclination.  SAVE

Good and Evil  Virtual Jewish Library.  Maimonides integrated the "good inclination" and "evil inclination" in his Aristotelian theory of the soul; Kabbalah reads the concepts in cosmic terms.  SAVE

SAVE "The Evil Inclination"

"Jerusalem," William Blake.

The Holy Land of England

 

The King James Bible, along with the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespeare, and Milton, transformed the English language, introducing a vibrant lexicon that is used to this day.  It also fused biblical mythology with concepts of English national identity.

Holy Writ  Edward Rothstein,  New York Times.  Transforming the English language, the King James Version also permanently shaped English and Western ideas about human nature, freedom, and responsibility.  SAVE

Trading Routes and Construction  The Map as History.  Animated maps showing the worldwide expansion of British rule, step by step.  SAVE

Cataracts, Hips, Knees, and Tonsils  Oliver Wright,  Independent.  These are among the surgeries being rationed to save money for the National Health Service.  SAVE

God's Secretaries  Adam Nicolson,  HarperCollins.  How great English prose emerged from the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the plague.  SAVE

SAVE "The Holy Land of England"

Meet Sholem Aleichem

 

In the 1880's, the Ukrainian Jew Solomon Rabinowitz began his literary career under an assumed name—assumed because he was writing in Yiddish, rather than a respectable language such as Hebrew or Russian. The pseudonym he chose was Sholem Aleichem.

The Pot  Sholem Aleichem,  YouTube.  The monologue summarized by David Roskies in Laughing in the Darkness, plus two more stories, is here interpreted by the actor Rafael Goldwaser. (Video; Yiddish)  SAVE

Tevye  Sholem Aleichem,  YouTube.  Maurice Schwartz directed and stars in this 1939 melodrama based on the stories that would later inspire Fiddler on the Roof. (Video; Yiddish with English subtitles)  SAVE

SAVE "Meet Sholem Aleichem"

View More in Languages

Insight & Analysis

Pound Foolish  John Stoehr.  Forward.  While Pound hailed Hitler, and Gertrude Stein cheered Franco, William Carlos Williams eschewed doctrine and orthodoxy. Herbert Leibowitz's compelling new biography of the modernist poet shows why.  SAVE

Canon Fodder  Itay Zutra.  H-Net.  For the eminent literary critic Dan Miron, the prominence of Jewish authors writing in non-Jewish languages is proof of the impossibility of assembling a modern Jewish literary canon..  SAVE

Heartland of the Jewish Book  George Washington University.  A typographic panorama of Hebrew printing in the Ukraine. (With gallery of images).  SAVE

Hebrew Underground  Norman Berdichevsky.  New English Review.  After half a century of a USSR policy to condemn Hebrew as a "reactionary tool," the language emerged in the 1970's as the lifeblood of the "Refusenik" movement.  SAVE

Drowning in the Red Sea  Ruth R. Wisse.  Jewish Review of Books.  The history of Yiddish publications in America shows what moral credit writers of the highest order were prepared to extend to the Soviet Union.  SAVE

Does Anyone Speak Arabic?  Franck Salameh.  Middle East Quarterly.  Arab nationalists promoted the idea that anyone who speaks Arabic is an Arab. But for centuries, very few Middle Easterners have spoken the language called standard Arabic.  SAVE

Holy Writ  Edward Rothstein.  New York Times.  Transforming the English language, the King James Version also permanently shaped English and Western ideas about human nature, freedom, and responsibility.  SAVE

Powered by eResources