Jewish History & Culture
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Fight of the Century
Joe Louis’ boxing match against Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in 1938 remains one of the great sporting events of the 20th century — even though the fight in front of nearly 70,000 spectators lasted all of two minutes and four seconds. Some 67 years after that fateful night of fisticuffs, David Margolick, a Vanity […]
Larry David Died for our Sinsw
Larry David, the producer-writer-star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has just finished airing the fifth season of his HBO program. Many people find him hilarious. Others find him annoying in the extreme. Both are right, of course, and David builds his humor out of this particular intersection of pain and pleasure. However, this season has been […]
Crystal Clear (700 Sundays)
Billy Crystal has something he wants to share with you. Crystal has had a diverse and varied career, with plenty of ups and downs, as a stand-up comic, a TV performer and a movie actor. On the one hand, he starred in “When Harry Met Sally,” a movie that convinced many non-Jewish women to imagine […]
The Painted Bird - Revisited
Forty years ago this Oct. 15, Houghton Mifflin published “The Painted Bird” by Jerzy Kosinski. The book was immediately acclaimed as a must-read text on the Holocaust and the nature of human cruelty. In the years leading up to and following Kosinski’s 1991 suicide, his reputation was tarnished by a series of revelations that the […]
The Great Question (Who We Are)
THIS WEEK’S COLUMN WAS A COVER STORY IN THE JEWISH JOURNAL OF LOS ANGELES (and a pretty funny cover — so I thought I’d share it with you). We’re almost halfway through the first decade of the 21st century. Not a bad time to assess “Who We Are.” “Who We Are: On Being (and Not […]
In Search of Himself (Bruce Goldsmith's "When It Comes to Women")
The High Holidays are always a good time to reflect, and this year, as I was serially sermonized in ways both inspirational and depressing, I was asked to consider that we can always start anew — that, as the dorm posters used to say, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.†[…]
Read More… from In Search of Himself (Bruce Goldsmith’s “When It Comes to Women”)