Category Archives: Personal Reflections

Yossi Klein Halevi’s ‘Letters to a Palestinian Neighbor’ may not reach its intended audience, but it may well have another closer to home
— Read on www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/261166/return-to-sender

The embedding of Jewish material into the Soviet animated children’s TV series “Cheburashka” by its Jewish creators calls into question the narrative that Jewish self-expression was wholly suppressed in Soviet popular culture.
— Read on www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/260892/cheburashka-soviet-animation

Bay Area pride! Love to see pieces related to where I happen to live!

National Poetry Month: ‘Contraptions’ at Bay Area’s Contemporary Jewish Museum
— Read on www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/260192/jewish-contraptions

Is Israel an Apartheid State? One South African’s Encounter. – Tablet Magazine
— Read on www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/190413/my-parents-israel-my-apartheid

The Children’s Book That Introduced Young Americans to the Young Jewish State
— Read on www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/259996/habibis-adventures-in-the-land-of-israel

Helen Maryles Shankman Questions Whether Her Stories Trivialize the Holocaust
— Read on www.jewishbookcouncil.org/_blog/The_ProsenPeople/post/trivializing-the-holocaust/

Long-lost Yiddish songs from Soviet era shed light on under documented history of Holocaust and lost Jewish culture.
— Read on abcnews.go.com/International/long-lost-yiddish-songs-hand-stories-soviet-jews/story

London’s East End has been home to a vibrant community of Jews since the 1880s. But today, in this area, once home to almost 200 synagogues, just four functioning synagogues remain—three Ashkenazi and one Sephardi.

David Rosenberg, a social historian of the East End, explains how the demograp…
— Read on www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/257405/the-east-ends-last-shuls

Had history gone another way, I might have grown up in a rural Moldovan village.

So begins Absent, the masterful 2015 documentary film by director Matthew Mishory. As history did not go another way, Mishory’s father and grandparents left Moldova before WWII, and he grew up in Los Angeles. Abse…
— Read on www.tabletmag.com/scroll/259390/now-streaming-on-amazon-masterful-documentary-captures-the-haunting-history-of-moldovan-jews

On Apr. 7, 1932, Franklin Roosevelt, then governor of New York, gave his first coast-to-coast radio address on the National Broadcasting Company. He called for economic solutions that rose “from the bottom up,” and for financial support for farmers and relief to small banks and homeowners. And h…
— Read on www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/258291/brother-can-you-spare-a-dime