Word: jewish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...role in the market-place or its mirror in the mind, the arena of rational discourse. Religious ritual can be important only to those who need to have abstract, transcendent belief acted out on a concrete level. For those without the need religion is without purpose. I am Jewish, but I can not watch the Communion or the Elevation without feeling my spirit begin to escape. It is all the better, when the service is in Latin and I can feel I am observing a mystery. Capitalism has smothered that spirit. It would like to have you believe that because...
...West Germany has not had an inspirational leader since Adenauer, or Britain since Churchill; a contest between Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Tory Leader Ted Heath would involve a choice of Yorkshire pudding or boiled potatoes. Mrs. Golda Meir has more panache-at least for those who appreciate Jewish mothers -than her predecessor, Levi Eshkol, but she can hardly match that prophet-politician David Ben-Gurion. Revolution has unseated the egomaniacal Nkrumah of Ghana and Sukarno of Indonesia -no loss to the world, except in drama. Egypt's Nasser and Cuba's Castro still have the messianic...
Frustrated Talent. The recruiting of the generals and colonels coincides with a basic change in the government's economic thinking. Israel's Zionist founders scorned commerce and were more interested in agriculture and socialist ideology than in industry. Thus the Jewish talent for business was late to bloom in Israel. Civilian managers often lacked the skills to run modern industrial corporations or to deal with foreign investors on anything like equal terms. Lately, the government has concluded that Israel's future security depends almost as much on a strong economy as on a tough army. Last year...
...concludes Willie O'Toole, the Irish-Jewish poet narrator of Alan Lebowitz's novel. Climbing Willie's Ladder. Chutzpah, that untranslatable Yiddish expression referring to some brand of unique insolent bravery, is what propels us through that joke, life. And in Willie's case, it takes an awful lot of chutzpah...
...CLIMBING WILLIE'S LADDER. though, is a first novel and has its flaws. In the most introverted parts of the narrative (particularly at the beginning). Lebowitz edges towards the genre of the paranoid-Jewish-confessional novel, and he does not seem entirely comfortable with it. Willie's abject rantings and ravings about the dirt he exchanged with his ex-wives and lovers are laid on a bit too thick. It is only when Lebowitz brings Willie out of himself and into the world of a widow-friend of his late mother's and her tacky L.A. apartment or into...