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14 - “Non-Jewish, Non Kosher, Yet Also Recommended”
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- By Ruth Ellen Gruber, American journalist, Europe
- Edited by Jonathan Karp, State University of New York, Binghamton, Adam Sutcliffe, King's College London
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- Book:
- Philosemitism in History
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 21 March 2011, pp 314-336
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Summary
Froehlich's pastry shop is in the heart of Budapest's former main Jewish quarter, a few steps away from the city's central Orthodox synagogue. A sign in Hebrew at its door declares its wares to be kosher, and the shop is the haunt of Budapest Jews sipping tea and nibbling on sweets, as well as visiting tourists seeking to sample local Jewish specialties. Here, amid the cherry strudel and cabbage pasties, you can often find other items for sale: miniature Jews made out of marzipan. The tiny figures, just three inches high, sport the black suits, black hats, earlocks, and dangling ritual fringes worn by Hasidic or other ultra-orthodox Jews of East European origin. Beardless, they apparently represent boys, Yeshiva bochers; as far as I can tell, they are sold as Bar Mitzvah cake decorations or party favors. Each is in a clear plastic container. Produced by Jews and directed at a Jewish market, they are a humorous, even self-ironic take on a Jewish reality: kitschy, to be sure, but by no means malevolent. At the same time, however, these Jewish self-representations clearly embody the same stereotypical markers so often used to depict Jews in far less flattering contexts. I bought a couple to place beside a hook-nosed Jewish puppet I had bought in Prague and bearded figurines of Jewish peddlers I got in Poland.
Inspired by Woolf: A Conversation
- from INSPIRED BY WOOLF: A CONVERSATION
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- By Ruth Gruber, University of Cologne, Katherine Lanpher, The New York, Susan Sellers, University of St. Andrews, Kris Lundberg, New York City, Anne Fernald
- Edited by Elizabeth F. Evans, Sarah E. Cornish
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- Book:
- Woolf and the City
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2010, pp 220-232
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Summary
AF: Thank you so much for coming to our final panel, “Inspired by Woolf”…. I'm just going to briefly introduce our host Katherine Lanpher, so you know why it is that she's here. … I first met Katherine on a night that left many traces on this conference: a benefit for Girls Write Now, which began with a brief, brief paired reading at Bluestockings, and moved on to readings for grown-ups, cocktails, and burlesque dancing at The Slipper Room. (I can assure you I failed to incorporate burlesque dancing in this Conference.) But you can hear Katherine online at Time magazine, where she hosts the Time Financial Tool-Kit Podcast, and also at Barnes and Noble.com, that's bn.com, as you know, where she hosts Upstairs At the Square—a fantastic live show with authors and musicians taped at the flagship Barnes & Noble in Union Square. She is a substitute host for The Takeaway, a new National Public Radio show that is a collaboration of WNYC, the BBC, and the New York Times. And she is a contributing editor for More magazine. If you open up this month's issue, you'll see her travel piece on tracking jaguars in Belize, and she tells me that in her suitcase with her was a Rebecca Solnit book, so it's all coming together. She's also the author of a wonderful memoir, about her move from St. Paul to New York, called Leap Days. I'm very proud also to call her my friend, and delighted to introduce you to her as your host tonight. Thank you.
KL: You're very kind. I am so conscious that I am all that's standing between you and cocktails, but I also know that we have an incredible panel, and I have been looking forward to this very much. Rebecca Solnit, at the keynote yesterday, talked about the fact that there are many, many, many “Woolfs,” and that hers, in particular, had been a Virgil … Well, we have three different incarnations, if you will, of Virginia Woolf up here today. We have Susan Sellers, a scholar and novelist. We have Kris Lundberg, an actress who has founded a theatre company.
The Kraków Jewish Culture Festival
- from AFTERLIFE
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- By Ruth Ellen Gruber, American author and journalist who has been based in Europe for many years. She
- Edited by Michael C. Steinlauf, Antony Polonsky, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 23 November 2019
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2003, pp 357-368
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TWO weeks to the day before the cathartic ceremony on 10 July 2001 that marked the 1941 massacre of Jews in the north-eastern Polish town of Jedwabne, Jan T. Gross found himself in another north-eastern Polish town, dancing in the streets to the strains of klezmer music. Gross is the author of Neighbors, the book published in 2000 whose revelations that it was local Poles, not German Nazis, who slaughtered Jedwabne's 1,600 Jews, touched off an unprecedented national debate on Poland's role in the Holocaust.
Gross attended the Jedwabne commemoration, where the Polish president, Aleksander Kwas´niewski, begged forgiveness for the massacre ‘in my own name, and in the name of those Poles whose conscience is shattered by that crime’. But on 26 June he danced in Sejny, near the Lithuanian border, along with hundreds of other people, following the final concert of a ten-day festival and workshop that celebrated klezmer music and Yiddish culture in a town where no Jews have lived since the Holocaust.
Called the Musicians’ Raft between New York and Sejny, the events featured public lectures and exhibits, as well as master classes by leading klezmer musicians from the United States, that drew participants from half a dozen countries in eastcentral Europe. ‘It was incredible’, said Krzysztof Czyz.ewski, the founder of the Sejny-based Borderland Foundation (Fundacja Pogranicze), which sponsored the encounter—and which was also the original publisher of Gross's book. ‘The final concert was held in the White Synagogue here. There were about 500 people, and it was so crowded that people had to sit on the floor. The concert lasted about three hours and then everyone, including all the musicians, went out into the streets, singing and dancing.’
The contrast between the joyousness of the concert and the intense solemnity of the Jedwabne ceremony was striking. But the two events, and others like them, form part of a related phenomenon: the exploration and even embrace of Jewish culture and history as an integral part of national history and, ideally, as a necessary and urgent resurrection of national memory. ‘We witness the closing of a circle that seemed broken forever, thanks to the tragic history of our times’, said a prospectus for the Musicians’ Raft festival. ‘A new meeting, stronger than the worst prejudice and oblivion, is born from broken links, tragic conflicts, and ruined memory.’