Word: jewish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...many subjects in Zadie Smith's second novel--Buddhism, Jewish mysticism, the Hollywood studio system--one that she presumably did not have to research was the bug-light allure of celebrity. In 2000, at age 24, she became deservedly famous for White Teeth, a sprawling, erudite comedy about culture clash and bioengineering in postcolonial Britain. Brilliant, young and beautiful, she became a favorite of the British media, which followed her love life and hairstyle changes with a fervor Americans reserve for cast members of Friends...
...Alex buys and sells autographs as his vocation. His avocations include drinking and drugging to the point of blackouts, cheating on his girlfriend and infuriating his friends, who have arranged for him to say Kaddish (the Jewish mourner's prayer) for his father, in the hope of bringing him closure and ending his self-destructive behavior. (Alex, as is typical ofSmith's melting-pot London, is half Chinese, half Jewish. We also meet black English Jews and an African-American Buddhist.) But Alex has a more pressing concern: finding Kitty Alexander, a reclusive, aging film star in New York City...
...Teeth in size and scope but not in themes. Religion, race, fame, death--Smith hits all the biggies here, and nearly every major character has a theory about at least one of them. Alex, for instance, is compiling a book that divides the world into people and things with "Jewish" traits (including poplar trees, Jimmy Stewart and John Lennon) and "goyish" traits (including oak trees, Elvis fans and the Jewish troubadour Leonard Cohen). It's inspired by a Lenny Bruce riff, the novel's epigraph, but it becomes a predictable dog-people-vs.-cat-people dichotomy. In her narrative Smith...
...closest friends on the Dodgers were usually the subs at the end of the bench. When a former player approaches Koufax for an autograph, she writes, he blanches because a "peer [has] become an acolyte." As one of the very greatest of living ballplayers, still venerated by fans--especially Jewish fans, who embraced him with a fervor bordering on idolatry--Koufax could build a very profitable life out of his fame, yet he appears at maybe one autograph show a year, content to make a living instead of a killing. He has elected, writes Leavy...
Judaism and Islam, for starters, cannot even agree on which son he almost sacrificed. Then there is Abraham's Covenant with God. Many Jews (and some conservative Christians) believe it granted the Jewish people alone the right to the Holy Land. That belief fuels much of the Israeli settler movement and plays an ever greater role in Israel's hostility toward Palestinian nationalist claims. "Our connection to the land goes back to our first ancestor. Arabs have no right to the land of Israel," says Rabbi Haim Druckman, a settler leader and a parliamentarian with the National Religious Party. This...