March 2nd 2007
Boris Fishman
September 27th 2006
Mixed Messages
Anna Shternshis reveals how Soviet propaganda forged a new brand of Jewish identity
Histories of Soviet Jewry have usually told stories of oppression and resistance. In Soviet and Kosher, Anna Shternshis, a Moscow-born professor of Yiddish language and literature at…
January 11th 2006
Forged Reunions
A picture of post-Soviet provincial life, both Jewish and gentile
In “Roots,” the new film by Pavel Lounguine, a Ukrainian conman named Edik lures several wealthy North Americans on a heritage tour to their ancestral shtetl of Golutvin. The film,…
December 19th 2005
Ghetto Music
When Italians fell for klezmer, Francesco Spagnolo tuned them in to the forgotten sounds of their own people. Audio Interview by Boris Fishman. Listen courtesy of Nextbook.
November 11th 2005
Spelling Errors
How Bee Season lost its sting on the screen
The first thing one notices about Richard Gere in his otherwise sensitive performance as Saul Naumann, the domineering patriarch of a Jewish family in existential tailspin in Bee Season, is that…
June 17th 2005
Back From the Shadows
Dovid Bergelson’s skepticism served him poorly in life but sublimely in art
In 1907, a 23-year-old writer from Kiev named Dovid Bergelson decided to send fragments of his latest work, an impressionistic account of shtetl life titled “At the Depot,”…
May 12th 2005
Jewel in the Crown
For three centuries, Salonica was a vibrant hub of Ottoman life.
The northern Greek city of Salonica—Thessaloniki to the Greeks—passed through Roman and Byzantine hands before falling to the Ottomans in 1430, which is the starting point of Mark Mazower’s…
March 17th 2005
Austrophobia
Sam Apple encounters a shepherd who sings in Yiddish—and forces him to question his deepest fear.
In Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria’s Jewish Past With Its Last Wandering Shepherd, author Sam Apple—an editor at the literary sex…
February 25th 2005
Reorientation
Tom Reiss on the mysterious Byronic figure from Baku who posed as a Muslim prince.
The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life tells the story of Lev Nussimbaum, born in 1905 in Baku, then a cosmopolitan…
January 16th 2005
A Novel Ending
Liev Schreiber pulls a switch on Everything Is Illuminated.
The clever subversion of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated, which described a young American Jew’s search through Ukraine for a woman…