Well Versed

Since its exhibition, “Sailboats and Swans,” was interrupted by the fierce winds and water surge caused by Hurricane Sandy, the Andrea Meislin Gallery is getting images from the show out to viewers via email. Every Monday, the gallery emails three photographs of the show, featuring the work of Israeli photographer Michal Chelbin.

I love my Kindle. When setting off on a trip, I luxuriate in being able to choose from a juicy new novel, an engrossing biography or rereading a title I’ve enjoyed while not having to shlep extra weight. And yet, when reading Edmund de Waal’s “The Hare with Amber Eyes” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), I did find myself squinting at the complex family tree and wondering what the printed version might offer.

According to the kabbalists, on Isru Chag, the day after the holidays of Sukkot, Pesach and Shavuot, some of the light of the holiday lingers, so the sanctity is extended.

So it was with post-holiday eyes that I visited The Jewish Museum on Wednesday, following the season of holidays ending with Sukkot and saw Izhar Patkin’s installation “The Messiah’s glAss.”

Jacqueline Nicholls is an artist deeply informed by Jewish teaching and text, but her message — expressed in mediums as diverse as embroidery, corsetry, clothing, paper-cuts and print — is both subtly and explosively subversive.

Timing is everything: Given this year’s High Holy Days schedule, along with the renewed rush that arrives after Labor Day, coordinating a Sunday evening in September for our first synagogue Book Group meeting of the season proved more challenging than choosing what we would read, which we’d discussed before our summer break. Thus it happened that the only Sunday available was the one that fell between the Ten Days, after Rosh HaShanah and two evenings prior to Yom Kippur. Our reading selection: “Metamorphosis” and other stories by Franz Kafka.  

Eventually, this day had to come, the day when I wrote my last blog for The Jewish Week. In the fall I'll be starting a Ph.D. program in U.S. history at Columbia, which means I'll no longer be able to hold this job.  But the good news is that I'll be able to freelance, so you can expect to see my by-line somewhere in The Jewish Week in the coming months.  

The logic that recently led CUNY to carve a specific category for Jewish faculty members—“White/Jewish”—for its new Diversity Actions Plan makes sense.  Apparently many Jewish faculty members felt that “White/Caucasian” didn’t adequately define their sense of ethnic affiliation.  But in the past two weeks since the news broke—the New York Post, true to from, put it on everyone’s agenda with its klieg-lit