Habitus

by Habitus · 11/08/12

As New York continues to face extreme weather and massive recovery challenges, we wanted to make one more way for our readers to help.

For any copies of our New York issue sold in November, we will donate 70% of the sale price to local organizations working on rebuilding and serving New Yorkers in need after Hurricane Sandy.

For a preview of what’s inside, read the 1923 essay by Konrad Bercovici on “The Greatest Jewish City in the World.” His caustic look at Jewish life in New York has a lot of relevance today:

There is an old European saying that every country deserves the kind of Jews it has.

If so, New York does not know what it deserves, for it has every kind—gangsters, social workers, philanthropists, corrupt politicians, patriotic capitalists, preaching socialists, anarchists, bigots, atheists, ignorant illiterates, highly educated men. Every kind of Jew, from the lowest strata of humanity to the peak of culture, is represented here—a complete nation.

Also, take a look at our interview with World Trade Center designer Michael Arad, who has many timely reflections on trauma and recovery in our city.

Here’s the link to purchase. Please share with your friends!

by Habitus · 01/27/12

We are thrilled to share our latest issue, New York, in which we turn our attention homeward. Get yours today.

Click here to see the full Table of Contents.

Read our interviews with Michael Arad and André Aciman, and read a timeless essay from Konrad Bercovici—penned in 1923—about “The Greatest Jewish City in the World.”

More previews and additional New York material will be posted soon, so keep visiting our site.

by Daniel Bloch · 01/27/12

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Reclaiming home, warts and all

“Pinch your nose and off we go,” advises novelist and Habitus contributor Aleksandar Hemon in this month’s issue of Guernica Magazine, as he leads us through the “deep shit pit of war, peace and politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Hemon unflinchingly examines the foreboding trend of ethnicity-based education in the former Yugoslavia. (See our Sarajevo issue for more from the region.) “Do three or more passports make you alive several times over?” wonders Irin Carmon in a fascinating meditation on citizenship and family, as she explores her acquisition–and potential loss–of a German passport. “Where they fled, we globetrot, a historical asymmetry that parallels the other privileges earlier generations earned for us.” (See our Berlin issue for more on contemporary German Jewish identity.)

Life in pictures, lost and found

Be sure to check out three captivating photo essays: Jessica Ingram’s “A Civil Rights Memorial” captures the often un-memorialized sites of hope, resistance and violence scattered throughout the South that, once re-discovered, provide vivid insight into the struggle to end segregation. Polish photographer Rafal Milach has followed the lives of seven young Russians as they find their way amidst ever-shifting landscapes. And Hiroyuki Ito, whose work has largely focused on New York, his home for the past 20 years, documents his return to Japan following the death of his father.

And don’t miss out on browsing through the hundreds of random photographs found on the streets of Buenos Aires–namely the Once neighborhood, the one-time center of Jewish life in the city–collected and loosely curated here. It’s at once an entertaining and unsettling experience.

Sketches of Idisshu

Now that our New York issue is about to come out, we have time to catch up on some recent books we missed. One of our favorites is Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land, co-edited by the late, great Harvey Pekar. The book is a colorful consideration–through comics and essays–of secular Yiddish culture through the ages, focusing on the artists and writers who helped revive the language in the diaspora, especially in New York. And another new book that we just might actually get a hold of someday is the Yiddish-Japanese Dictionary/Yidish-Yapanish Verterbukh/Idisshu-go jiten, which runs over 1,300 pages and was compiled by one of Japan’s foremost Yiddishists. Who knew?!

by Daniel Bloch · 01/10/12

Here’s what on our mind this week:

From the scribes

Poet, translator and Habitus contributor Lisa Katz offers an intriguing who’s who of contemporary Israeli poetry, from more well-known writers like Agi Mishol (featured in our Budapest issue), Dan Pagis, Yitzhak Laor and Taha Muhammad Ali to relative newcomers (at least for those of us who are stateside) like Anat Zecharya, Almog Behar and Admiel Kosman.

In Shalom Auslander’s new novel, Hope: A Tragedy, the main character, already besieged by a slew of problems in his daily upstate-New York existence, discovers Anne Frank herself living in his attic. Auslander discusses the connotations of this here.

And Etgar Keret’s story, “Creative Writing,” finds a husband and wife spinning fantastical tales.

Through the viewfinder

We said goodbye this week to Eve Arnold, who passed away at 99. The daughter of a rabbi, Arnold was the creator of iconic images of celebrities (perhaps most famously, Marilyn Monroe) and ordinary folk alike, and one of the first female photographers to be hired by Magnum.

In another, more gradual goodbye, the photographer William Gedney documented the demolition of the Myrtle Avenue elevated subway in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the reshaping of the landscape beneath it, all from his apartment window.

by Daniel Bloch · 01/04/12

Happy new year! Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Start 2012 off with a few fascinating reads: The Shifting Boundaries of Jewish Identity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Multiple Identity Narratives and Histories explores both new and familiar nuances of what it means to be Jewish. BOMBlog considers the rollicking and largely fabricated legacy of Octobriana, a Soviet-era cartoon bombshell. And philosopher John Gray offers a thoughtful antidote to doom-and-gloom scenarios created by recent socio-political change.

And the latest in city-speak: Economist Edward Glaeser celebrates cities as catalysts for “collaborative brilliance.” SoBro vs. ProCro? The Atlantic Cities finds out what’s behind the art (or lack thereof) of (re)naming a neighborhood. The Manhattan grid system design just turned 200, and the Museum of the City of New York is honoring it through April. And finally, what’s lovelier than a frigid New York night lit up by neon?

by Daniel Bloch · 12/28/11

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Urban renewals

If you haven’t guessed by now, we love a good city story, and here are a few: Read Shelley Salamensky’s insightful look at “Diaspora Disneys,” re-creations–and, in some cases, renewals–of urban Jewish life and culture in Krakow, Birobidzhan and a town in western Spain. Follow cookbook author and food blogger Alex Schmidt as she enlists her bobe Dora on a hunt for Jewish soul food in Mexico City. Check out Madrid’s version of the High Line, part of an enormous project that includes new parks, plazas, transit options and a rebirth of the Manzanares river. Finally, be sure to take a look at the Best CityReads of 2011, courtesy of The Atlantic Cities.

Literary musings

Habitus contributor and friend Susan Bernofsky remembers Robert Walser, who died on Christmas Day, 1956. The New York Times considers the Bible’s overwhelming literary legacy through the ages. And the daughter of Ezra Pound fights to have her father’s name disassociated from an Italian right-wing group connected to the recent shooting deaths of Senegalese immigrants in Florence.

Cinematic intimacy

Tintin and Margaret Thatcher biopics not your thing? Have no fear: Dau, a grandiose doozy of a film about the life of physicist Lev Landau is already five years in the making; here is a preview/exposé from GQ. (Warning: lie down before you read this because you will need to afterward.) On a smaller scale, Papirosen, the latest film from Argentine director Gastón Solnicki will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image next month. For the film, Solnicki–who will appear in person at the screening–distilled hundreds of hours of footage of his extended family to a brief 74 minutes, charting their lives in Buenos Aires and beyond.

Portraits

Photographer Gisèle Freund captured Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in eerily timeless color images, but photographing the star writers of her day was only part of her fascinating journey. We salute abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler, who passed away this week at the age of 83. And a special cosmic shout out to Romare Bearden, whose centennial is currently being honored at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

by Michael Sterling · 12/15/11

Discovery Times Square will display for two weeks one of the oldest and best-preserved manuscripts of the Ten Commandmants in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Biblical Times, an exhibition located in Times Square. The manuscripts will only be available for viewing from December 16 to January 2. Due to their extreme sensitivity to light and humidity, it is unsafe to show them for a longer period of time. The leather scroll is dated from 30 B.C. to 1 B.C.; it was discovered in 1952 and has since been studied and displayed all around the the world.

The Scrolls exhibition is presented in partnership with the Israeli Antiquities Authority. Click here to see The Dead Sea Scrolls’ website. Click here to read a related article by Edward Rothstein of The New York Times and here to see a post by Randy Kennedy for The New York Times Arts Beat.

by Michael Sterling · 12/15/11

Dan Miron’s From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking is a new look at how modern Jewish literature fits into the Jewish literary canon. Prior to Miron’s work, much criticism dealing with Jewish literature insisted on the necessity for viewing it a continuous, evolving literary mode. In his book, Miron argues that “discontinuity is a staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing,” that it is important to analyze Jewish literature with the understanding that various Jewish works don’t fit into the canon as easily as many argue. Thus, the works are not continuous but contiguous:

Vast, disorderly, and somewhat diffuse … characterized by dualities, parallelisms, occasional intersections, marginal overlapping, hybrids, similarities within dissimilarities, mobility, changeability, occasional emergence of patterns and their eventual disappearance, randomness, and, when approximating a semblance of significant order, by contiguities.

Sachar Pinsker, an Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture at the Near Eastern Studies Department and the Judaic Studies Program at the University of Michigan, reviewed the work for the New Republic. He writes: “The challenge of anyone who faces such a bewildering and contradictory subject is to resist the temptation to find false harmony and unity, and at the same time to avoid abandoning altogether the very category of ‘Jewish literature,’ which Miron still refuses to renounce.”

Click here to read the review. Dan Miron is Leonard Kay Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking is available for purchase.

 

by Michael Sterling · 11/21/11

Jenna Weissman Joselit, a Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at the George Washington University, reviewed Jonathan Boyarin‘s Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side. The book is a history of the district told through the story of a humble synagogue, Boyarin’s own shul which he’s attended since he was a youth in New York. Joselit’s review, titled Praying with Ghosts, is published in The New Republic.

The Lower East Side, situated in the very heart of the city in south Manhattan, is in many ways its own space apart from New York. “Everything about the place–its architecture, its rhythms, its residents–seemed at odds with the rest of the city. It still does,” writes Joselit.

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by Habitus · 11/21/11

This conversation between memoirist, novelist, critic, and scholar André Aciman and Habitus editor Joshua Ellison was recorded last summer at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in lower Manhattan, at an event entitled, “Is New York the Diaspora?”

Diaspora is not a word you use a lot in your writing, but exile is a concept you return to again and again. So, I ask, as a beginning: are Diaspora and exile the same thing?

An exile is someone who has been forcibly evicted or dispossessed. Force is inherent to the displacement of an exile; otherwise he is just an immigrant. Therefore, as an exile, you are a wanderer until you find a home—if ever you do. Diaspora is a condition of dispersion that applies to more than one individual; you cannot have one person being diasporic. You cannot be a Diaspora unto yourself. This is an important distinction because the experience of solitude defines exile but does not necessarily have any kind of repercussions in a Diaspora. For example, you could dismantle an entire ghetto in Vilnius and transport it to Brooklyn. Those people are in the condition of Diaspora but they are together. They bring with them their own history, a set of cultural values, and artifacts that keep bound them together.

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