E.L. Doctorow helped Austin Ratner
22 Jul
2011 November-December, Jewish Art, Culture and Music - Moment Magazine

Speaking Volumes // Austin Ratner on E.L. Doctorow

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Many writers seem daunted by the autobiographical novel—ashamed to write of themselves, as if that were either self-indulgence or exploitation. And of course with James Joyce and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a paragon, many do not even dare to try. But Joyce didn’t frighten off E.L. Doctorow, who mined his own Depression-era childhood in New York for the 1986 National Book Award-winning World’s Fair.
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01 Dec
2014 November/December, Jewish Art, Culture and Music - Moment Magazine

Book Review // The Talmud: A Biography Banned, Censored and Burned…The Book They Couldn’t Suppress

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Full disclosure: I am not a biblical or Talmudic scholar. As a professor of literature, I have taught selections from the Bible in humanities courses. I think of myself as a secular humanist and an agnostic interested in understanding the role of religion in the lives of millions of people.
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01 Dec
2014 November/December, Jewish Art, Culture and Music - Moment Magazine, World

Book Review // Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France

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French anti-Semitism, c’est une vieille histoire. True, following the Revolution, les Juifs were liberated from their ghettos. True, the Jewish Leon Blum was elected prime minister of France during the late 1930s. And true, except for the United States and Israel, no other country contains so many Jews—some 600,000 according to the latest statistics.
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01 Dec
2014 November/December, Jewish Art, Culture and Music - Moment Magazine, World

Book Review // An officer and a Spy

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Be wary of historical fiction, especially if it’s good. It will forever mix up in your mind what actually happened, or what we can be fairly certain happened, with the inventions of playwrights and novelists, whose aim might be to draw a deeper meaning from events than mere facts can provide, but who do some violence to those puny facts.
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10 Nov
2014 November/December, Jewish Art, Culture and Music - Moment Magazine, World

Gaza: A History // A Long Look at a Small Place

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Today, the Palestinian enclave of Gaza is known as a flashpoint for conflict that far eclipses its minuscule size. At 140 square miles—sharing an eight-mile frontier with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and hugging Israel’s border for nearly 32 miles—the sliver of desert is only twice the area of the District of Columbia.
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Trieste by Daša Drndić
11 Aug
2014 July/August, Jewish Art, Culture and Music - Moment Magazine, World

Book Review // Trieste

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Creating art from the events of the Holocaust remains as daunting as ever. Soon, those awful events will move beyond the reach of living memory while the need for testimony grows more pressing, not less. But the responsibilities of art are different from those of history: Theodor Adorno’s much-misrepresented dictum that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz” can simply be used as a lazy shorthand for refusing to engage with difficult and challenging creations.
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Orphée by Marc Chagall
08 Aug
2014 July/August, Jewish Art, Culture and Music - Moment Magazine, Visual Moment

Visual Moment // Chagall’s Orphée

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“Marc loved the small-town feeling of Georgetown,” Evelyn wrote. “He liked being able to greet our neighbors and walking to Woolworths to buy postcards and an art-supply store to buy more brushes.” One day he told her that he wanted to “do something for the house,” but later, he said, “No, the house is perfect; I’ll make a mosaic for the garden.”
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Sanctioned vs. Degenerate Art
18 Jun
2014 May/June, Jewish Art, Culture and Music - Moment Magazine, Visual Moment

Visual Moment // “Degenerate” Art

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In July 1937 Germany’s National Socialist Party opened an exhibition in Munich it termed “Entartete Kunst,” or “Degenerate Art.” Intentionally housed in cramped, poorly lit conditions and awkwardly hung, the works on view were accompanied by inflammatory, denigrating labels. The exhibition was an open declaration of the Nazis’ state-run war on modern art and the effort to impose their officially sanctioned conception of art through propaganda and force.
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22 May
2014 May/June, Jewish Art, Culture and Music - Moment Magazine

Book Review // The Story of the Jews

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The great Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who died in 2009, famously declared that history was “the faith of fallen Jews.” Yerushalmi had trained under the preeminent 20th-century Jewish historian Salo Baron, whose epic (and unfinished) 18-volume A Social and Religious History of the Jews was celebrated for its paradigm-shifting rejection of the “lachrymose” view of Jewish history. Despite a life lived in the shadow of Jewish history’s most lachrymose moment—both his parents were murdered in the Holocaust—Baron insisted that Jewish history was defined not by dying but by living, by the astonishing creativity and vitality of an ever-changing Jewish culture.
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