Author: Mark Hershlag

(JTA) — I am a sucker for extreme sports — or at least reading about them. My ideal Sunday afternoon involves a comfy chair and a thick book or Netflix documentary about mountain climbers trying to escape an avalanche, or an ultra-runner suffering during a 24-hour race. Stories of people under extremis appeal to the […]

He did not, however, ruin the Gilded Age for me — that is, the actual historic period, roughly from the end of the Civil War to the end of the 19th century. Like many others, I am fascinated by the hallmarks of an excessive age: the lavish homes of the “robber barons,” the stultifying cultural […]

(JTA) — Tom Stoppard is one of those playwrights who flatters you with his erudition. His 1993 play “Arcadia” dives deeply into the mathematics of algorithms and fractals. His breakthrough 1966 play, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” is a graduate school-level midrash — an alternate telling — of “Hamlet.” You leave the theater feeling smarter, […]

(JTA) — The history of Jewish identity and politics in America has been told as a triumph of spiritual renewal (“A Certain People,” Charles Silberman, 1986), as an overdue flexing of political muscle (“Jewish Power,” J.J. Goldberg, 1996) and as a series of clashes between denominations and world views (“Jew vs. Jew,” Samuel Freedman, 2006). […]

(JTA) — In her new book “Bad Jews,” Emily Tamkin frames recent American Jewish communal politics as a series of clashes between antagonists who insist there are right ways and wrong ways to be Jewish — that is, “good Jews” and “bad Jews.” It’s a useful and revealing way to look at how Jews fight among […]

(JTA) — People in Seattle praying for rain — only on Opposite Day, right?  Admittedly, the rain jokes write themselves, but there is no humor to be found in this situation: The Pacific Northwest found itself desperately hoping for precipitation over the past several weeks. Seattle’s hottest summer ever on record extended into a toasty October […]

(JTA) — When I read the news about Kanye West, I didn’t know whether to turn off my phone, or throw it. I knew it would only be a matter of time before the emails and texts began rolling in: What do you think about Kanye? What’s to be done about antisemitism in the Black […]

(JTA) — A powerful revival of “Parade,” the 1998 Broadway musical about the 1915 lynching of the Jewish factory manager Leo Frank by a Georgia mob, is wrapping up a short-term engagement at New York’s City Center. The show is stirring and moving without trivializing or exploiting one of the worst antisemitic incidents in U.S. […]