The movie Borat is a lot of things, a comic triumph, mean, weirdly Tocquevillian. It is filled with anti-semitic humor, and I admit I laughed. But there is also something really scary about the film, and that seems to me the takeaway, if you are Jewish (which the maker, Sacha Baron Cohen, is): the feeling Read More
Who’s responsible for mounting the superb exhibition devoted to the paintings, drawings, prints and notebooks of Edward Hopper (1882-1967) at the Whitney? The accompanying press materials don’t say. The show, part of the museum’s ongoing anniversary celebration, is a world apart from the rest of Full House: Views of the Whitney’s Collection at 75, an Read More
Goading Galbraith
To the Editor:
Among the complaints that Charles Taylor has with Peter Galbraith’s book on the Iraq war [“Breaking Up Is Good to Do: The Case for an Iraqi Split,” Book Review, July 31] is a big one, which proves to be a major error, and a small one, which is so minor Read More
It’s always seemed to me that groups that have suffered from discrimination—Jews, women, people of color, for instance—have a special responsibility to speak out on behalf of other groups still suffering from bias. And that Senators from New York State have a special responsibility to take a leadership role in that fight. So …. Read More
From The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick (1999):
“In the Jewish tradition, some memories are very long lasting… Some memories, once functional, become dysfunctional. The concluding chapters of the Book of Esther tell of the queen’s soliciting permission to slaughter not just the Jews’ armed enemies but the enemies’ wives and children—with a Read More
You’ve got to hand it to an artist who could even conceive of an erotic burrito, and then muster up the talent to create a sculpture fulfilling the idea’s absurdist promise. There it is, at the beginning of The Art of Betty Woodman, a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring more than 50 Read More
Throughout his elegant and compact sequence of espionage novels set in the Europe of the 1930’s and 40’s— The Foreign Correspondent is the ninth—Alan Furst has been trying to marry romance and dread. This is not something that would have occurred to Eric Ambler who, in his prewar foreign-intrigue novels, wrote like a man hunkering Read More
Throughout his elegant and compact sequence of espionage novels set in the Europe of the 1930’s and 40’s—The Foreign Correspondent is the ninth—Alan Furst has been trying to marry romance and dread. This is not something that would have occurred to Eric Ambler who, in his prewar foreign-intrigue novels, wrote like a man hunkering down Read More
I went to a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah on Saturday and in some part because of my blog, and its discussion of Jewish politics, felt a little alienated. I forgot to get a yarmulke, then I ran to get one. I wondered who if anyone there had seen my ideas. Later, at the reception, I Read More
Note waterfront Gehry-cluster.
She’s called Dusseldorf! And we’re lucky to have the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia as our sister city.
Soon, a newly-minted New York-Dusseldorf marketing partnership will mean ads on bus shelters and on the Staten Island Ferry. We’re doing some shit over there, too. It’ll be easy since all of the Read More
