By Eddy Portnoy
Erik Jan Hanussen rose from Jewish poverty to become one of Europe’s most-famed mentalists. He wound up soothsaying for Adolf Hitler before dying a mysterious death.
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By Eddy Portnoy
The punk-folk band Schmekel raises the issue of transgender people in Jewish culture. There is evidence that the shtetl was not as fusty about such matters as one might think.
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By Eddy Portnoy
‘MetaMaus’ reveals that Art Spiegelman’s original ‘Maus’ isn’t simply a Holocaust narrative. It’s a memoir of his father, a sort of ‘300-page yahrzeit candle.’
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By Eddy Portnoy
The biography “Al Jaffee’s Mad Life” couldn’t have a more apt title. Jaffee’s engaging tales of his mad, mad, mad childhood are even stranger than his long tenure as a cartoonist at Mad magazine. A journey through the Jewish bizarre, Jaffee’s life story starts out as a near-typical one of a family of Jewish immigrants, but then takes a series of crazy twists and turns, one of which lands him on a Birthright-shtetl program.
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By Eddy Portnoy
By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the Forverts, aka the Jewish Daily Forward, was not only the best-selling Yiddish daily in New York, but was also a center for political action and social reform. At the helm of this project was the paper’s founder and editor, Abraham (Ab.) Cahan, a mustachioed crusader almost universally regarded as impossibly abrasive and exceedingly tyrannical by writers and sub-editors of all stripes. As the most significant Yiddish journalistic and literary institution in New York City and, possibly, the world, it was natural and inevitable that the Forverts and its editor in chief would become targets for the Lower East Side’s literary and political satirists.
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