The black hat. The wig.
2014
Visionary Hope
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Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture by Peter Gabel
Review by Roger S. Gottlieb
Articles
Ready and Rising: A Review of Sariyah Idan’s New Album
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It seems like every summer there’s an album that comes along and rocks my world. When I first listened to this album in my car during my morning commute, the fierce lyrics and smooth rhythm on Deeper at once captivated me.
Christianity
Co-Creating a Peaceful World Through Love-in-Action
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A review of Chris Saade’s book Second Wave Spirituality: Passion for Peace, Passion for Justice, which explores the constructive aspects of globalization.
Articles
Beyond the Narrow Straits of Memory
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We must face stories of suffering children, as well as the stories of suffering that we tell to children, in order to understand the religious tropes at work in American culture…. By facing our wounds across boundaries, we can struggle toward the blueprints of rebuilding our memoryscape.
Articles
Rabbi Zalman and the Making of Seeking the 36
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In 2007 the two of us—novelist Stephen Billias and filmmaker Dennis Lanson—completed our collaboration on a screenplay entitled The 36 about the Lamed Vov, the Thirty-Six Just Men of Jewish folklore. While trying to sell the screenplay, we decided to make a separate documentary film called Seeking the 36 in which we would look for the Lamed Vov living in the world today.
Art
To Deserve Such Pain
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During his lifetime, Leonid Tsypkin, who survived Hitler and Stalin only to face the sterility to post-war Soviet life, was forced to write “for the drawer.” Discovered by today’s audience, his style, which blurs the background while simultaneously capturing the specific, has special resonance in an age of near-total surveillance.
Articles
A Painful Past Remembered from Within: Frederic Tubach’s Book on the German Experience During the Third Reich
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At once a crash course in the history of Nazi Germany and a weaving together of non-Jewish Germans’ personal recollections, German Voices conveys a sense of what life was like for the average person living under Hitler. While acknowledging that no amount of understanding or empathy can heal the generational wounds of the Holocaust, Tubach nevertheless brings an identifiable human dimension to a period of history that is often dismissed as too horrific to comprehend.
Articles
Dream-Wizardry: A Collaboration Between Rodger Kamenetz and Michael Hafftka
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Jacob and Joseph begat Freud who begat Jung, who begat the poet Rodger Kamenetz and the visual artist Michael Hafftka. Their collaborative wizardry, published in the book To Die Next To You, is stunning. The poems and drawings (always paired) create vivid, waking dreams on psychological and spiritual subjects—dreams that are as resistant and open to interpretation as Pharaoh’s.
Articles
The Sand Dancers
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“In a faded photo, they dance on shore, / two kids we were, scuffing up bursts of sand; / hands rise and fall in a rapid step-slide-spin.” – a poem by Grace Schulman
2014
Joe Louis’s Fist
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“My father said when Louis won, the radio static was a wave / of sound that stayed all night like the riots blocks away in Harlem, / as the scent of lilac and gin wafted down Broadway to his window.” A poem by Peter Balakian.
2014
Faith and the Metaphor Muscle
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To grapple well with the big challenges of our times, Hering says, we need to reclaim the language of myth, metaphor, and imagination.
2014
The Legend of How the Tao Te Ching Came Into Being on Laotse’s Journey Into Exile
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“When he was seventy and fragile, / the Teacher felt compelled to seek repose, / for the Good within the land was on the wane, / and Evil gaining strength again. / So he drew on his shoe.” Jon Swan’s translation of a poem by Bertolt Brecht.