Things as they are, the modernist poet Wallace Stevens liked to point out, become changed when played on a \”blue guitar.\” What his metaphor meant to describe was nothing more nor less than the transforming power of the imagination.
For the Jewish Community Relations Committee (JCRC) and its parent organization, The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, this day is a major victory. The Dodgers\’ $84 million star player has just held a press conference announcing his new role as spokesperson for KOREH L.A., an exciting culmination for the first year of JCRC\’s new literacy program.
There is something touching in Hazony\’s underlying thesis: that Israeli Jews have lost contact with the guiding ideal of Zionism; namely, the belief in the existence of a Jewish state.
Jewish demons have always pursued Philip Roth. Starting with the 1959 publication of \”Goodbye, Columbus,\” his iconoclastic and now classic portrait of materialistic Jewish suburbanites, Roth has dramatized his characters\’ struggle to reconcile their eternally warring urges to simultaneously lay claim to and distance themselves from (even sometimes flat-out reject) their Jewish heritage.
Fortunately, California Civil Code section 2225 forbids convicted felons from reaping such profits. Our state\’s law is based on New York\’s \”Son of Sam\” law, enacted to prevent David Berkowitz, a social miscreant, from selling a book and movie rights about his 1977 New York City murder spree.
Eric Lawton\’s latest collection of photographs, with text by Phil Cousineau, evokes the age-old enigma of where the soul resides.
In Philip Roth\’s new novel, \”The Human Stain,\” a classics professor at a small New England college creates a fictional identity for himself.
In her talk, which ran more than an hour, Deborah Lipstadt reflected on her almost five-year ordeal, which began when Irving sued her and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in a British court.
Don\’t let the unfunny introduction to \”Haikus for Jews\” (Harmony Books, $11) fool you.
Retired bookseller Leo Bretholz, a Holocaust survivor, can hand you his own death notice.
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