By Matthue Roth
There may be more blatantly Jewish punk bands than the Brooklyn-based Shondes — Australia’s YIDCore used to play a ska cover of “If I Were a Rich Man,” and Can!!Can’s Patrick Aleph stage-dives while screaming out lessons from the midrash — but there’s probably no better name for one.
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By Matthue Roth
Ellen Frankel, CEO and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society, has labored for the better part of her career to make Jewish traditional texts more palatable to a general audience. The new “JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible” — a hybrid of JPS’s modern translation, along with Frankel’s reinterpretations of words and phrases that were archaic, awkward or weird — is clean and precise. From the first sentence, it’s clear we’re reading a translation that’s both old-school and vibrant: “In the very beginning, God created a world — the heavens and the earth — out of nothing. But this world was without rhyme or reason.”
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By Matthue Roth
Leanne Lieberman, the author of the definitive novel on Teenage Orthodox Lesbians (there’s little competition) is, surprisingly, neither Orthodox nor gay herself. This book review takes a look at Lieberman’s debut novel and examines the places where her character’s path converges and diverges from her own.
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By Matthue Roth
Israeli food is known for a lot of things, but refinement is not traditionally one of them.
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By Matthue Roth
The recent PEN/Oakland National Book Awards were a bit of a change of pace for Steve Dalachinsky. For one thing, the poet’s usual performance venues are smoky Manhattan bars and tiny underground jazz clubs, not academic auditoriums. For another, Dalachinsky is far more accustomed to going to other people’s performances than to his own.
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