Advertisement
by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived, by Simon Callow. Vintage, 232 pages, 2017 IN THIS AGE of doorstop biographies, the actor and biographer Simon Callow’s breezy 200+ pages on Richard Wagner, Being Wagner, appear to be a quirky, quixotic venture. How to squeeze so tumultuous a […]
Read MoreAn India Travelogue, Part 7 by Lawrence Bush Click for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. SUSAN HAD AN ERUPTION of “Delhi belly” a couple of nights ago, which laid her low for a few hours and has put us both on an even stricter regimen about what we will and won’t eat (no more ice cubes in India, […]
Read MoreIsaac Rice, a music teacher, innovator in the game of chess, and businessman who developed the U.S. Navy’s first modern submarines and helped found the company today known as General Dynamics, was born in Bavaria on this date in 1850. He emigrated to the U.S. at age 6, studied music in Paris, returned to America as […]
Read Moreby Dan Grossman “SCENES from the Collection,” the first permanent exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum in over twenty-five years, pulls off the triumphant feat of being both rooted and experimental. The exhibition it replaces, “Culture and Continuity,” attempted to tell over three thousand years of Jewish history in only two floors. “Scenes from the Collection” turns […]
Read Moreby Marty Roth I have since then learned to value them [Jews] better, and, if every kind of pride of birth were not a foolish contradiction in a champion of revolution and democratic principles, the writer of these pages might be proud that his ancestors belonged to the noble House of Israel, that he is […]
Read Moreby Marc Jampole IN A COLD WELCOME, Ohio State historian Sam White reminds us that the 21st century is not the first time that Europeans in North America have ignored the climate and thereby created human disasters. In the century after the second European discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492, several European nations […]
Read MoreRabbi Zevi Hirsch Kallischer, an Orthodox leader who published a widely circulated book in 1862 that endorsed Jewish resettlement in the land of ancient Israel, and traveled to several German cities to help spark the formation of colonization societies, died at 79 in Thorn, Prussia on this date in 1874. A vehement opponent of Reform […]
Read MoreZnamya (“Banner”), a Russian publication launched by Pavel Krushevan, a far-right, antisemitic journalist, began publishing the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in serial form on this date in 1903, according to Mitchell A. Levin’s website, This Day in Jewish History. A fabrication about an international Jewish plan to weaken the will of gentiles through […]
Read MoreAN EXHIBIT AT THE NEUE GALERIE by Mitchell Abidor THE VIENNESE-BORN artist Richard Gerstl committed suicide on November 5, 1908, at the age of 25. He had never exhibited his paintings, which once numbered around seventy. It would not be until 1931 that they were exhibited, thanks to the efforts of his brother, and Gerstl’s modest […]
Read MoreThe Jews of Hungary were granted complete political and civil rights on this date in 1849 by the First National Assembly, which had been established by a revolution led by Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894). Their civil liberation lasted for just two weeks, however; after the Austrians (with Russian assistance) had suppressed Kossuth’s revolution, the Jews were harshly sanctioned with onerous taxes, imprisonment, and […]
Read More