There\’s a 1,000-year-old haggadah, there\’s an Internet haggadah, and now there is a new $15,000 Arthur Szyk Haggadah.
That means, \”Why is this night different from all other nights,\” in Sranan.
But what\’s Sranan, you ask? Sranan is the primary language spoken in South America\’s Suriname, which has one of the oldest Jewish populations on the American continent. Is is also spoken in Aruba, Netherlands and the Netherlands Antilles — with a total of 426,400 speakers today.
For most of his 92 years, artist Sam Fink has been obsessed with the pursuit of freedom and the beauty of language. Even though he is a painter, he calls language \”the highest form of art, higher even than painting and music.\”
Because of their intense activism, Jews have been among the paper\’s most devoted readers and fiercest critics. A substantial part of the paper\’s circulation base has long been in the broad Jewish belt extending from the Westside through the West Valley.
Alberto Senderey is a model Jewish professional, and not just because he invited me as one of five Americans included for the four-day symposium in beautiful Oxford. An energetic, optimistic burst of Argentine energy, he recognized that Jewish media have a unique and underappreciated perspective on Jewish communal life.
My parents have given me so much; it\’s now time to start giving back to them. I\’m referring to guilt in this case. Specifically, guilt about not living up to one\’s potential, about not keeping up with the Joneses\’ children, about not providing ammunition for bragging rights over Shabbat dinner with friends.
UCLA\’s 32-year-old Jewish newsmagazine Ha\’am has been struggling with growing pains over the past year. Last spring saw the release of their first print edition in five years, and the staff planned to make it a quarterly publication. That\’s still the goal, but their follow-up issue just recently hit the stands in time for, again, spring.
Five years ago, veteran comic book artist Joe Kubert visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He expected to be moved, but since he and his parents had escaped from Poland before the Nazi genocide began, he assumed his emotional reaction would be relatively contained. Then, he saw something that struck him profoundly: \”Yzeran,\” the name of the shtetl where he had been born, etched on a wall filled with names of towns that had been completely obliterated in World War II.
This one word began a creative odyssey that found its completion this month, with the publication of \”Yossel — April 19, 1943,\” Kubert\’s graphic novel about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust — artistic, as well as physical — with the date in the subtitle referring to the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
As you might have heard, I\’m leaving The Guardian next year for The Times, having finally been convinced that my evil populist philistinism has no place in a publication read by so many all-round, top-drawer plaster saints. (Well, that and the massive wad they\’ve waved at me.)
The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" have come to Los Angeles.
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