ESPN says it fired the employee who used the phrase "chink in the armor" in a headline about a New York Knicks loss in which breakout NBA star Jeremy Lin had nine turnovers, the AP reports. Further, ESPN anchor Max Bretos has been suspended for 30 days f

One of the defining characteristics of the hysteric is that he doesn't realise he is being hysterical. If he did, he would simply calm down.The Luis Suarez affair has been conducted in that state of utmost agitation that envelops people when they feel th

Shalom Auslander's God is blood-brother to Randy Newman's: "I burn down your cities – how blind you must be/ I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we/ You all must be crazy to put your faith in me/ That's why I love mankind". In Ausla

In a 2008 essay in Harper’s Magazine, Vivian Gornick traced the slow development of the Jewish-American voice from the patois of ghetto sentimentality to the outsider yawp of Saul Bellow, making a claim on the latter part of that hyphenated identity, thr

"Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona: Now that the campaign surge of Pennsylvania's "favorite son," Rick Santorum, keeper of public "morality," has turned media attention to the culture wars, it behooves us to consider what kind of s

A couple of years ago, observers noticed that black people make up a high percentage of Twitter users, and moreover that many use the medium differently than many white people do—connecting in bigger and bigger clusters; entertaining each other with dist

I think it was Philip Roth who said that Swissair was the most beautiful word in the English language. Could I nominate Intourist as the most hideous? For those too young to remember, I should explain that this was the state tourist agency that in the ba

There’s a fundamental and perhaps fundamentally irresolvable tension at the heart of Shalom Auslander’s first novel, Hope: A Tragedy — the tension between text and context, or between the artist and the art. Anyone who’s read Auslander’s two earlier book

This deliberately offensive premise is not original. Philip Roth used the same idea in his 1979 novel The Ghost Writer and, in acknowledgement, Auslander gives Roth a cameo. Auslander has more fun with the concept, though. He makes Anne Frank a hunchback

Yesterday Terry Teachout conducted a “purely personal inventory” of the ten American novels he “most wished” he had written, and this morning Patrick Kurp countered with his own list of ten. If you removed the alien and seditious titles from my own three

On 15 May 1939, when Isaac Babel was arrested on false charges and taken to Moscow's Lubyanka prison, the NKVD also confiscated 15 manuscript folders, 11 notebooks and seven notepads. "They did not let me finish," he told his common-law wife, and it will

Gersh Kuntzman Clinton Hill resident Nathan Englander, seen here at Urban Vintage, has written the best book of the year, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.” “Can I eat a banana in front of you? Is that weird?” Novelist, playwright, trans

The literature of Jewish disaffection is now itself a part of Jewish tradition, its gestures of rebellion recuperated as insignia of belonging. Isaac Babel, who wrote about the impotence of the Jewish intellectual, is now a hero to Jewish intellectuals;

Her origins were grimly ordinary. Born in 1879, the sixth child of eleven, Margaret Higgins saw her middle-aged mother die in 1899, debilitated by childbearing and the struggles of caring for a large family on the meager income of an irresponsible husban

George W. Bush had one small office devoted to faith-based initiatives, and was savaged for it. Barack Obama, on the other hand, says faith drives much of his domestic agenda — and no one even blinks. We are in "the fourth year of the ministry of George

The nebbish is the bumbling caricature of a Jewish male, embodied by figures like Woody Allen and George Costanza. Where did he come from? The boxers and strongmen who turned the image of the Jewish nebbish on its head The Tattler is a new weekly column

This unusual little book explores the idea of puppetry, beginning with a visit to a master puppet maker in a small studio in Rome, and ranging far and wide to include Balinese shadow puppets, Punch and Judy shows, literary puppets in the works of writers

Where are you now and what can you see? I'm in my study. Through the window, I can see a surprise burst of pink azalea in the wintry garden and tall sycamores, their bare branches punctuated by nests. What are you currently reading? I'm judging the Orang

Architecture and the Jewish Outsider In The Architecture of Exile, Stanley Tigerman reminds us that we are burdened by Paradise. The Garden of Eden set the bar high: that “single, unique but unknowable place denied by God to humanity but reverently, rele