Joshua Cohen

National News

Community News

International News

Israel News

Arts & Culture

Fast Forward

The Shmooze

Forward Forum

Editorial

Toothy in Gotham

By Joshua Cohen

‘Chronic City” initially seemed an important and pleasurable novel to review, just as it must have initially seemed, to Jonathan Lethem, an important and pleasurable novel to write. The ideal reviewer, as if a character in science fiction, relives the writer’s experience word by word, sentence by sentence. The reviewer becomes, in a sense, the author’s projection or double, questioning choices of plot, wording and punctuation, and revising paragraphs and pages, until what results is an alternate book: Like it or not, you’re reading my own version of “Chronic City” now. (This is apropos of nothing much. But it seemed important and pleasurable enough at the beginning.)Read More

On Adorno On Music

By Joshua Cohen

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was a philosopher only after he was a composer, as if the music he made in his youth required an entire system, and a later age, of interpretation. There was a method to this method, too. First he discarded European thought; then European thought, or the governments that gave it political sanction, discarded him. In 1938, Adorno left Frankfurt for New York, then for the Promised Land of Los Angeles, where he summered even in winter alongside his collaborator Max Horkheimer and peers Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann.Read More

La Mort Que Je Conviens

By Joshua Cohen

Ghérasim Luca was born in 1913 in Bucharest and, as a Jew and intellectuel, spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German and French, the last being the language of his books. A dissolute late adolescence found Luca traveling often through Paris, where he became interested in the movement called Surrealism. He spent the war hiding in Romania, which hated its Jews but occasionally sheltered them, too.Read More

The Christian Soldiers of the Holy City

By Joshua Cohen

They began as a charitable organization, a brotherhood charged with caring for Jerusalem’s indigent pilgrims before the First Crusade. They ended the Crusades as warlords, infamous for their violence and greed. This role reversal would seem to be a staple of American foreign policy, but it is not, or not only that. It is also the history of the Holy City’s Order of the Knights Hospitallers — the subject of a new book by British historian David Nicolle.Read More

Eulogy for a Fading Jewish Wonderland

By Joshua Cohen

There’s a strain of Zionism peculiar to the Q train — that subway line wending its way from Manhattan’s Lower East Side and over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, through Hasidic Midwood, past the Russians in Brighton Beach, then terminating at Coney Island’s Stillwell Avenue stop, “the largest subway station in the world.”Read More


 

Most Read Articles