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Jewish Intellectuals and the Writing Life

by Erika Dreifus on
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This event, scheduled for April 29 at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, looks very interesting:

Jewish Intellectuals and the Writing Life

“Join prominent critics and intellectuals as they discuss the relationship between literary reputation, intellectualism, and Jewish life now and over the course of the last half century. Participants include Morris Dickstein, Distinguished Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY; Ruth Franklin, journalist for The New Republic; literary critic, essayist and novelist Daphne Merkin, author of Dreaming of Hitler; Edward Rothstein, cultural critic-at-large for The New York Times; and Steven Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University and author of Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing. Co-sponsored by The Center for Jewish Studies, the PhD program in English, and The Leon Levy Center for Biography.”

Fo more details, click here.

Promised Land: Exodus and America, A Festival of Ideas

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Planned for October 22-26, 2008, “Promised Land: Exodus and America” is a five-day festival of ideas in Boston organized by the New Center for Arts and Culture and Nextbook and presented in partnership with Northeastern University and the Museum of African American History. The festival “looks at how various Americans–from the Puritans to African American slaves to new immigrants–have adopted and adapted the Exodus story to meet their own material and imaginative needs.” Student discounts are available. To find out more, click here.

From My Bookshelf: The Temple Bombing, by Melissa Fay Greene

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Last year I spent a few days in Atlanta, and at one point I passed the beautiful Temple on Peachtree Street. I hadn’t yet read Melissa Fay Greene’s 1996 book, The Temple Bombing, but I’d heard about it (it was a National Book Award Finalist), and I knew the basic story it told: the Temple, Atlanta’s oldest synagogue, was bombed in 1958. Thankfully, no one had been hurt.

Now I’m reading Greene’s book, and while I haven’t yet finished it, I’m very glad that I’ve finally gotten to it. The book not only chronicles the bombing, but offers a rich history of Atlanta Jewry; a detailed portrait of Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, the Temple’s leader in 1958; and a reminder of just how difficult the struggles for integration and civil rights in the South really were.

At about 500 pages (with footnotes), it’s a challenging read. But very much worth the effort.

Survey of Hebrew and Yiddish Influence in the United States

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

I spent a bit of time this weekend responding to questions posed within a survey now being conducted by two professors at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. It was actually pretty fun to think about some of the survey items, many of which focus on the respondent’s familiarity with and use of Hebrew and Yiddish words. You can read about the survey project here, and jump right into the questions here.

Another Stellar Essay from Jessica Apple

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Jessica Apple has another must-read essay up on the Nextbook site.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

As a child in Houston, safe within the miniature shtetl of my grandparents’ bayou-side home, I never felt my life was in danger because I was Jewish. I felt comfortable as a Jewish Texan and could easily have waved a Texas flag which bore a Star of David instead of the Lone Star. But more than ten years ago, by the time I decided to move to Israel, I knew Jewish had trumped Texan. Now I’m the mother of two Israeli-born sons, Tom and Guy, and I’m astounded, because last month during Pesach they cornered me and asked me if I’m really Jewish. “But you don’t know anything,” Tom told me after the Seder. “You just make up the words to the songs.” Then Guy added, “And you never went to the army. And you don’t even know how old Israel is going to be.”

“Sixty,” I said.

“No,” Guy said. “Fifty-ten. After fifty-nine comes fifty-ten.”

On Israel’s fifty-tenth birthday, from the window of our Tel Aviv apartment, the boys and I watched the Israeli Air Force flex its muscles with a celebratory air show. Tom and Guy saw a few planes swooping over the Mediterranean and then went back to something more interesting—their Sony PlayStation. I’d been curious to see Tom’s reaction to Independence Day, since the message he’d brought home from school after two months of back-to-back holiday studies had surprised me. After learning about Purim, Passover, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Memorial Day, this is what Tom said: “Everybody wants to kill us. Haman, Pharaoh, Hitler, Arabs. Everybody wants to kill us.”

I can’t tell Tom he’s wrong. I do make up the words to songs in Hebrew (and in English). And I can’t lie to him and tell him that no one wants to kill Jews, nor do I want to diminish the suffering of our ancestors. But I had the notion that living in Israel I’d be passing on Jewish history and tradition to my children without the paranoia and fear my grandparents so expertly passed on to me.

Read the rest here.