A balance between news and culture was our initial idea for this newsletter, because the news tends to offer a very grim perspective on cruelty, ignorance and greed, while art at least sometimes has the capacity to remind me of human creativity and generosity. But Blake’s always had a head-start on me (he’s older). Nonetheless, I’m hoping to share occasional “culture recommendations,” like this, to complement the media recommendations he’s been publishing.
1. Alan Mintz, a brilliant and generous scholar of Hebrew literature, in 2015 described Maya Arad as “the foremost Hebrew writer working outside Israel and one of the best novelists of her generation.” Still, it took until 2024 for one of her books, a collection of novellas called The Hebrew Teacher, to be translated into English. The title novella is set in the late 2010s and it concerns the tension between a university’s Hebrew language instructor and the newly arrived professor of Hebrew and comparative literature who shows up on campus. It feels so very, very close to the world I live in, as a Jewish Studies academic, that it’s a bit uncanny—I’m certain the characters are fictional composites, but I couldn’t help but picture people I know.
2. Because F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is easily one of the most celebrated and widely taught novels in U.S. history, I wasn’t surprised to hear that two separate musical theater adaptations were in the works now that the book is in the public domain. (Which means that the producers of these shows don’t need to pay fees to Fitzgerald’s estate, or worry about getting sued.) I got tickets to see them in part because there’s a long history of critiques of Gatsby as antisemitic, and I was curious how productions in 2024 would handle that. I hope I’ll be able to write something more extensive about these two shows at some point, but in the meantime, I can say, briefly, that while the shows handle race very differently (on Broadway, with “color-blind casting”; at the A.R.T., by making Gatsby a Native American passing as white), they handle the book’s notorious Jewish character, Meyer Wolfsheim, very similarly. That is, they both (a) cast an actor known for playing Jewish roles (one played Shlomo Carlebach in Soul Doctor, and the other played “the Rabbi” in a Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof); (b) they never explicitly call Wolfsheim a Jew; and (c) they give him a big, flashy song that positions him as the corrupter of a desperate and relatively innocent Gatsby. It’s up for debate whether this approach ameliorates the original text’s antisemitism or just hides it in plain sight.
3. Another reason I saw both those musical adaptations of The Great Gatsby is that I happen to have a 14-year-old musical theater fanatic living in my house. For that reason, too, I recently (belatedly) saw Come from Away, Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s 2017 Broadway musical about the airplanes grounded in Gander, Newfoundland, on September 11, 2001. I didn’t know much about the show, going in, and I can’t say I loved it, but I appreciated that it managed to avoid the annoying “Newfie” jokes that were popular in my Toronto childhood, and I was intrigued that one of the songs includes an extended quotation of “Oseh Shalom.” It turns out that Sankoff and Hein previously worked on a show, in 2009, called My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding, which I’m surprised not to have heard of before now. (And… cue the obligatory reference to Spamalot.)
4. On a recent episode of The Moth podcast—perhaps the most prominent and beloved podcast of people telling stories live on stage—Frieda Vizel very charmingly tells the story of the first haircut she ever got in a salon. I first met Frieda many years ago when she led a tour of Yiddish Williamsburg for a group of students I was teaching, and since then she has built up a fascinating YouTube channel with videos about the Satmar community, in which she grew up, and ultra-Orthodox Judaism in general. She’s a natural, gifted storyteller, and her story—the first one on the episode—gives a good sense of that, and of how powerful it can be when a person finally gets to wear the clothes or hairstyle that fits their sense of themselves.