Philip Roth 2002 (Dennis Van Tine/ABACAPRESS.COM)
The reviews of Blake Bailey’s
Philip Roth: The Biography have been pouring out on both sides of the Atlantic. What is striking is how badly written the British ones have been and how smart the American ones are. What makes the British reviews so much worse?
First, the bizarre omissions. Tim Adams’s review in
The Observer of Bailey’s biography doesn’t use the words “Jew” or “Jewish” once. This is extraordinary. Not only was Roth Jewish, he wrote constantly about Jews, from Anne Frank and Kafka to his own fictional characters Portnoy and Zuckerman. Roth couldn’t have been more Jewish. It’s not just the Jewish subject matter. Above all, it’s the voice, that distinctive mix of high and low, funny and serious. “If Yahweh wanted me to be calm,” he writes in
Those we lost in 2020: Remembering the rabbis, pioneers and innovators
Merlijn Doomernik
Meijer and Tedje van der Sluis during the filming of a 2018 documentary film about their marriage. Tedje died April 11, 2020, of the coronavirus.
(JTA) - There s no way to tally all those we lost in 2020, a year when we mourned even our ability to carry out time-tested rituals of grief.
Among those who died this year were some of the Jewish world s most famous and influential pillars in a range of industries, realms of thought and areas of activism - from the pioneer jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the moral thought leader Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to the Modern Orthodox rabbi Norman Lamm to the influential LGBTQ activist Larry Kramer.
The 5 Towns Jewish Times
December 28, 2020
(JTA) There’s no way to tally all whom we lost in 2020, a year when we mourned even our ability to carry out time-tested rituals of grief.
Among those who died this year were some of the Jewish world’s most famous and influential pillars in a range of industries, realms of thought and areas of activism from pioneer jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg to moral thought leader Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to Orthodox rabbi Norman Lamm to influential LGBTQ activist Larry Kramer.
But many of the people whose deaths tell the story of 2020 were not widely known, except among the people who loved them and the communities they enriched.