Palestinian Haute Cuisine Heats Up
“To this day, most Israeli Jews think of Arab food as cheap ‘hummus-chips (french fries)-salad-kebab’—all said as a single word. But it isn’t really Arab food at all.”
Book Review | The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova
Bulgaria. How little thought I had ever given to Bulgaria, but here it is in the vivid, fast-paced, fascinating new novel The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova. Author of the best-selling novel The Historian, Kostova is a writer who knows how to keep you in suspense, to frighten and amaze you, all while building characters whose fate will matter to you more and more as she reveals a whole country, its history, its tragedy, its politics, its scenery and its sad beauty.
A Rare Peek Into a Renowned Library’s Vault
The extraordinary works in this exhibition are rarely seen, and this is their first time in America.
Alan Alda and His Scientific Universe
Alan Alda loves to dig to the root of things. He has no patience for jargon, for flimsy logic, for impenetrable lectures. He wants to know: What is time? How do clocks work? What are the processes that govern the universe?
Remembering a Show That Flopped
The backward tale, coupled with having young, inexperienced performers play the roles of older adults, just wasn’t believable to audiences, and the show flopped after 16 performances.
Theodore Bikel’s Las Vegas Passover
We were in Las Vegas (and had been for five months!), where I was appearing twice nightly at Caesar’s Palace in Fiddler. The only possible time for our seder was at 2 a.m.
Why Susan Sontag and Bernard-Henri Lévy Spoke Out in Bosnia
Into the hell of Bosnia entered Susan Sontag. It was July 1993, her second visit, and she was in Sarajevo to direct a production of Waiting for Godot.
Alan Alda’s Passover
“Passover’s like Thanksgiving. People sit around and eat and drink and tell stories, are glad to be alive.”
Book Review // Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman
A double myth about Yitzhak Rabin has prevailed since his assassination in 1995. For the Israeli right, his peacemaking attempts were and still are evidence of traitorous subversion. For the Israeli left, and especially to much of the outside world, his memory is crowned with rare nobility.
Book Review // Heretics
Leonardo Padura’s Heretics is a remarkable book. Padura, who is certainly the most prominent of a small number of Jewish Cuban authors, might also be the most famous writer in Cuba today. Best known in this country for his Inspector Mario Conde detective series…
George Eliot Also Grappled With Feminism and Zionism
Just as Daniel Deronda probes the limits and possibilities for women in Victorian England, it addresses a different set of concerns regarding Jewish self-determination in Palestine.
The First Zionist Novel?
George Eliot’s ‘Daniel Deronda’ was written in 1876, 21 years before Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement—to the astonishment and delight of many contemporaries, and of many Jews ever since.