A Tale of Two Cohens: Purim in Montreal
Lyon Cohen wrote and starred in Congregation Shaar HaShomayim's first Purim spiel in 1885--and then led the Montreal Jewish community for half-century. His grandson Leonard didn’t exactly follow his lead, but he does have a big grin in the cast photo of the 1947 Purim Spiel.
Of Presidents, Rabbis, and Pews
Isaac Mayer Wise was the first Rabbi to meet with an American President. The conversation made Wise a celebrity, it also led to him getting punched in his synagogue, losing his job, and changing the way Reform Jews prayed.
Lechaim!
Back in the 1960s, the Rheingold Corporation ran a bunch of TV commercials—mostly during baseball games, if I remember correctly—vaunting the popularity of its beer among all sorts of minority…
Sephardi Soap
With the runaway success of the novel The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, a television adaptation was all but inevitable, and the decision of Yes Studios to invest record amounts of cash in the show, while eyebrow raising, is also unsurprising.
It’s a Novel: An Exchange
A couple of weeks ago, Allan Arkush wrote that it was “hard to even list all the things . . . that ring false,” in Joshua Cohen’s widely praised new novel. The author vehemently defended himself on both literary and historical grounds against what he called “a review like a pogrom.”
Fictional Revisionism
The first time I picked up Joshua Cohen’s new novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, I put it down when I reached page eighty-four.
No Less Lost
The past can be exhilarating, and it can be quicksand. So discovers Menachem Kaiser in Plunder, his expansive, complicated, generous memoir.
These Heroic Girls
"These heroic girls . . . they are a theme that calls for the pen of a great writer. How many times have they looked death in the eyes? . . . The story of the Jewish woman will be a glorious page in the history of Jewry during the present war. . . . For these girls are indefatigable."
“Wherever You Go, I Will Go”: Reading Ruth 1:16-17
It is traditional to read the book of Ruth on Shavuot. Leon Kass has been reading it with his granddaughter, and the result is a new book.
Forging an Identity
How did a young Sephardi polyglot from Constantinople transform himself into such an exemplary Mexican that newspapers hailed him as “‘more Mexican than a nopal,’” the prickly pear featured on the country’s flag?