Sarah Kessler

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Our Crowd

By Sarah Kessler

In Dori Carter’s luxurious and leafy Southern California town of Rancho Esperanza, the setting for her second book, everyone knows the neighbor’s social status, but nobody knows each other — or, it seems, themselves.Read More

Describing a Scribe

By Sarah Kessler

On an immediate level, illustrator Arthur Szyk’s (1894–1951) “The Scribe,” painted during his late twenties in Paris, is a confident display of technical mastery. Here’s a young artist who can do ornate, Renaissance illuminations; he can also give you Picasso’s abstraction. Actually, he can give you both at once. This painting, as it turns out, is the only one in which a Picasso appears in Szyk’s entire body of work — merely as though to prove he’s capable of it if he cares to show it.Read More

A Utopian Bronx Tale

By Sarah Kessler

In the mid-1920s, a group of immigrant Jewish factory workers decided that they’d come this far for something better than the slums they inhabited. So pooling resources, they orchestrated the construction of four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx, with practical goals for a better quality of life, and idealistic visions of a transformative way of living. “The Coops,” as one of the developments came to be known, the subject of an eight-years-in-the making documentary, “At Home in Utopia,” written and edited by Michal Goldman.Read More

The Sky’s the Limit: Celebrating El Al

By Sarah Kessler

‘And on the 2,083,785th day El Al was created,” proclaims an old color ad for the Israeli airline, divine light breaking across the runway as a plane touches down into the Holy Land.Read More

Celebrated Collection of Hebrew Texts on View, on Sale

By Sarah Kessler

The Valmadonna Trust Library, which is valued at more than $40 million and will be sold as a complete collection by Sotheby’s in a private sale, is a testament to the People of the Book’s drive to write.Read More


 

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