Tea, Lemon, Old Books

2011 reading

2012-01-01T13:56:00.002-05:00

December 2011
Jane Langton, The Deserter: Murder at Gettysburg
Kathleen George, Taken
Lee Goldberg, Mr. Monk on the Road
Jay Z, Decoded
Sara Paretsky, Tunnel Vision
Henning Mankell, The Dogs of Riga
Jane Langton, The Shortest Day
November 2011
Amos Oz, A Perfect Peace
Laurie R. King, The Pirate King
Jane Langton, Murder at Monticello
October 2011
Jane Langton, The Thief of Venice
Jane Langton, The Face on the Wall
Jane Langton, Dead as a Dodo
September 2011
Magda Teter, Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege After the Reformation
Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud
Jane Langton, Divine Inspiration
August 2011
Jane Langton, God in Concord
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
Jane Langton, The Dante Game
Jane Langton, Dark Nantucket Moon
Jane Langton, Natural Enemy
Jane Langton, Murder at the Gardner
Pink Horwitt, Jews in Berkshire County
Jane Langton, The Memorial Hall Murder
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence
Martha Grimes, The Winds of Change
Jane Langton, Emily Dickinson is Dead
Jane Langton, Good and Dead
Jane Langton, The Minuteman Murder
July 2011
Marisha Pessl, Special Topic in Calamity Physics
Marvin Heller, Studies in the Making of the Early Hebrew Bookk
Lynn Hunt et al, The Book that Changed Europe
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
Sara Paretsky, Total Recall
Sara Paretsky, Guardian Angel
David Liss, The Devil's Company
Laura D. Hirshbein, American Melancholy: Constructions of Depression in the Twentieth Century
C.P. Snow, Strangers and Brothers
Julian Symons, The Man Who Killed Himself
Julian Symons, The Man Whose Dreams Came True
Martha Grimes, The Old Wine Shades
Martha Grimes, Foul Matter
John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers
Egon Balas, Will to Freedom: A Perilous Journey through Fascism and Communism
Edith Balas, Bird in Flight: Memoir of a Survivor and Scholar
Joanne Dobson, Death without Tenure
C.P. Snow, The Search
Robert Goldsborough, The Bloodied Ivy
C.P. Snow, The Affair
June 2011
C.P. Snow, The Masters
Veronica Stallwood, The Oxford Exit
Guillermo Martinez, The Oxford Murders
Colin Dexter, The Secret of Annexe 3
Ann Blair, Too Much To Know
Harry Kemelman, The Day the Rabbi Resigned
Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude
May 2011
Colin Dexter, Mystery of the Third Mile
Brian O'Neill, Paris of Appalachia
Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash
Colin Dexter, Morse's Greatest Mystery
Manning Marable, Malcolm X
Colin Dexter, The Remorseful Day
Solomon Freehof, On the Collecting of Jewish Books
Colin Dexter, The Dead of Jericho
April 2011
S.J. Parris, Heresy
William Powers, Hamlet's Blackberry
Roy Rosenzweig, Clio Wired
Colin Dexter, Last Seen Wearing
March 2011
Colin Dexter, The Daughters of Cain
Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries
Graham Moore, The Sherlockian
Donna Leon, Willful Behavior
Donna Leon, Fatal Remedies
February 2011
Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America
Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only
Staurt E. Rosenberg, The Search for Jewish Identity in America
January 2011
Bill Bryson, At Home
Marion A Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore eds. Gender and Jewish History
Harry Kemelman, Someday the Rabbi Will Leave
Jill Patton Walsh, The Attenbury Emeralds
Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Case of Jennie Brice
Faye Kellerman, Hangman
Laurie R. King, The God of the Hive
Wilkie Collins, Armadale

2010 reading

2012-01-01T13:53:00.002-05:00

December 2010
Josephine Tey, The Singing Sands
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Margaret Drabble, The Sea Lady
Iain Pears, The Raphael Affair
Dick Thornburgh, Where the Evidence Leads
Vincent Lardo, McNally's Alibi
Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Harry Kemelman, Monday the Rabbi Took Off
Harry Kemelman, Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home
Harry Kemelman, One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross
November 2010
Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late
Jack Wertheimer, ed. Learning and Community: Jewish Supplementary Schools in the Twenty-First Century
Natalie Zemon Davis, A Passion for History: Conversations with Denis Crouzet
October 2010
Harry Kemelman, Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry
Jane Haddam, Festival of Deaths
September 2010
Haper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
August 2010
Naomi Ragen, The Ghost of Hannah Mendes
Jack Finney, From Time to Time
Josephine Tey, Brat Farrar
Barbara Burstin, Steel City Jews
Josephine Tey, Miss Pym Disposes
Stephen L. Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park
P.D. James, The Private Patient
David Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim
July 2010
Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman, The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menahem Mendel Schneerson
P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Geza Vermes, The Story of the Scrolls
Rebecca Goldstein, Mazel
Donna Leon, A Question of Belief
Irina Reyn, What Happened to Anna K
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Donna Leon, The Girl of His Dreams
June 2010:
Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism
Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystock and Its Diaspora
Robert Paul Wolff, The Autobiography of an Ex-White Man
Ann Waldron, The Princeton Imposter
Lee Goldberg, Mr. Monk in Trouble
David Lodge, How Far Can You Go
May 2010:
Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
Robert Paul Wolff, The Ideal of the University
Ken Koltun-Fromm, Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God
Samuel Rosenberg, Naked is the Best Disguise: The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes
Fred Inglis, History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood
April 2010:
Faye Kellerman, Blindman's Bluff
Mark C. Taylor, After God
March 2010:
Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza
Robert Bernard, Death of an Old Goat
Peter Charles Hoffer, The Historian's Paradox
Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People
February 2010:
Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance
Donna Leon, Doctored Evidence
Robert Grudin, Book
January 2010:
Hillel Halkin, Yehuda Halevi
E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
P.D. James, Talking about Detective Fiction
Ann Waldron, Unholy Death in Princeton

Update on the Study of Antisemitism at Yale

2011-06-21T10:37:00.003-05:00

The Yale Daily News reports that a new program may be in the offing.

Story here.

That was Friday: here is the report in the Forward from today.

Antisemitism and the Study of Antisemitism at Yale

2011-06-17T11:21:00.003-05:00

Antisemitism may be (chimerical) nonsense but it has had serious consequences in human history so the study of antisemitism should involve serious--and dispassionate--scholarship.

So what to make of the fracas over Yale's decision to close the Yale Initiative for the Study of Antisemitism after its initial five-year term?

Some of the critics (of Yale's decision):
Abby Wisse Schachter in the New York Post.
Alex Joffe in (or do I say "on"?) Jewish Ideas Daily.
Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post.
Walter Reich in the Washington Post

And the critics of the program (who applaud Yale's decision or at least sympathize with it):
Antony Lerman.
Jerry Haber (aka "Magnes Zionist")
Zachary Braiterman in the Washington Post (responding to Reich).
And Deborah Lipstadt in the Forward.

(Read the articles and blogposts above; don't read the comments unless you like to see how nasty humanity can be.)

All the people I link to agree that antisemitism is a bad thing (to put it really simply) and that it should be studied in a serious way in academia. (I decided not to link to anybody who thinks antisemitism is a good thing.)

To put it in the explicit terms of their arguments: the critics of the decision think that Yale has cancelled an important program that did serious academic work because the political implications of that serious academic work troubled some Yale faculty, administrators, alumni, and perhaps some deep-pocketed potential donors who passed over Yale as a result. The critics of the program think that the program was not doing the serious academic work needed or not doing enough of the serious academic work that the topic deserved, mainly because the program sponsored or at least tolerated shoddy academic work that conformed to certain political views, and that this undermined or threatened to undermine whatever other good academic work was happening.

I don't know the work of the Yale Initiative well enough to form a definitive opinion but I offer a couple of observations and questions:

1. What was Yale thinking (to the extent an institution can "think") in setting this up in the first place in the way they did? External funding, a non-tenured (non-tenure track) faculty member in charge, connections to external organizations, a topic that is bound to generate controversy, and not-very-clear oversight by faculty committees? All of this could have worked but clearly it did not and given the realities of how research universities work, Yale administrators should have foreseen some of the problems.

2. What was Yale thinking in just cancelling the program without an opportunity to correct deficiencies? If they did indeed think it was a hopeless case, then a clearer and more substantive explanation was needed. And someone should have been anticipating the reaction of the Jewish community and prepared a better response than "We have a lot of other Jewish studies courses."

Yale is my alma mater, the place I first got interested in Jewish studies in a serious way, and the place that significantly broadened my horizons in all kinds of ways. I'm eternally grateful to the institution and I'll keep making my little annual donation and paying my Quarter Century Fund pledge.
And it's quite possible that there is more to both stories (of the origin and of the end of the program) than meets the eye, but I am sorry to say that from where I sit, Yale looks awfully stupid in all of this.

Quote of the Day

2011-06-06T21:22:00.000-05:00

"I would be cooking and think, 'I'm not a numismatist, I'm not a Jewish studies professor, I'm a chef. What am I doing with my life?'"

--Xu Long, Chinese chef and author of Money of Ancient Judea and Israel

See here for the Sacramento Bee story (reprinted from the Los Angeles Times.)

Nook Color update

2011-02-13T10:47:00.002-05:00

Still pleased with this, especially the ability to take all the pdf's I want to read on a trip along with the detective novel for the way back without carrying a lot of paper.

The only major pdf issue seems to be that a pdf generated from a scan doesn't seem to work. The other slight annoyance is that if you are reading an epub book and then go to something else, the device puts you back on the page you are reading the next time you open that book. But for pdf, the device always puts you back at the beginning.

The lack of Hebrew support is annoying. Hebrew shows up fine in a pdf but does not show up in an epub book or in a word document. Maybe this will be taken care of in a future software upgrade?

The only other problem is my emerging addiction to the chess game that is included.

Nook Color: First Thoughts

2011-01-02T20:51:00.002-05:00

I have been thinking about buying an e-reader or a tablet for a little while and finally decided to buy the Nook Color. I bought it in Florida last week so I could play with it while on vacation.

My main reason for buying the Nook rather than the Kindle was that I wanted to be able to download a variety of e-book formats and not just ones available from Amazon. (My basic view is that the Kindle will be the betamax of tablets if Amazon keeps it proprietary.)

My main reason for buying the Nook rather than the IPad is that I wanted something a little lighter and smaller for travel and I figured that if I really needed the fuller computing possibilities, I would bring my laptop to wherever I was going.

So far so good. I am too cheap to actually buy any e-books so I have been reading only free stuff. So I have been mainly reading books published before 1923. I read the free sample Barnes and Noble classic edition of Dracula (never read it before), and I've been enjoying Wilkie Collins' obscure Armadale.

I'm basically making a gamble that more books will become available in e-book format, that public and university libraries will figure out good ways to lend them, and that publishers will price them so that people will want to actually buy them.
I am especially hoping that academic publishers will figure out a way to price e-books like paperbacks and not like hardcovers. Otherwise, I am going to be spending a lot of time on airplanes reading 19th-century novels.

I've also been transferring pdf's from my computer and reading them. A few of the files won't open so that's worrisome. I have to do some investigation to see why. Most work fine, though.

And the only other problem is that there is no support for Hebrew (unless embedded in a pdf). So no Hebrew web-browsing and no Hebrew in epub (google books). But Hebrew in a pdf (e.g. books scanned by hebrewbooks.org) works fine.

The web browser works fine although it has the same problems that a smartphone has--too small a screen for most websites (although the screen is bigger).
I looked at one youtube video and the quality was ok. You're not going to want to watch movies or tv shows on the Nook, but a short video will work.

Another Boston thought

2010-12-23T10:46:00.002-05:00

On my recent visit to Boston, something strange happened. A clerk in a store willingly engaged in small talk as she rang up the purchase.
Perhaps the holiday spirit? or maybe I need to rethink my "chit-chat index" in light of this new data.

PS Many apologies to the friends I wasn't able to see on this trip.

A visit to Boston and its MFA

2010-12-23T10:32:00.004-05:00

I had the chance to visit the newly renovated Museum of Fine Arts in Boston yesterday after my conference was over. Just a few weeks ago, they opened an enormous and beautiful addition mainly housing the American art collection. Next summer, they will open the renovation of the contemporary wing.

The new wing links to the older part of the Museum through a new visitor's center in the middle of the complex, as well as through some doorways and hallways leading off the pre-existing gallaries.

The Museum is now a lot like the city of Boston itself:

--a blend of old and new.

--incredible cultural riches along with just a little insecurity about whether the world will recognize those riches with New York just down the road.

--some fantastic public spaces and some odd little byways.

--a little confusing to get around. (Give up hope of seeing the museum or any part of the museum systematically unless you have a lot of time to study the map.)

--somewhat arbitrary local conventions. (Someone called me while I was in a corridor leading to the new wing--actually technically in the new wing--hung with tapestries and with nice benches to sit on. So I took the call and sat down to talk. A guard came over to tell me that I couldn't talk in that corridor, but that I could talk in the next corridor, in the old wing.)

A little more WUMB

2010-11-23T12:22:00.004-05:00

Listening right now to "These Times We're Living In: A Red House Anthology"
which includes:

Jimmy LaFave #95
Bill Staines #70
Eliza Gilkyson #43
Lucy Kaplansky #38
among others.

Some of the songs are good, while others show off instrumental or vocal virtuosity but are ultimately unsatisfying.

I've also been listening this week to "Newport Folk Festival-1963-The Evening Concerts, vol. 1" with Joan Baez (#9), Bob Dylan (#1), Jack Elliott, The Freedom Singers, Sam Hinton, Mississippi John Hurt, Ian and Sylvia, and the Rooftop Singers, which is much, much better.

The other CD I borrowed from the library at the same time is "Klezmer Nutcracker" by Shirim, a group out of Boston that did not, in fact, make it onto the WUMB list. An interesting concept, at the very least...

Update

2010-09-28T09:09:00.002-05:00

Been very busy and have not had time to post.

In case for some reason you rely on this blog (http://tea-lemon-oldbooks.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-to-drink-coffee-in-pittsburgh.html) to decide where to drink coffee in Pittsburgh, I must tell you that Kiva Han's location on Forbes Avenue near Magee-Women's Hospital (not the Forbes and Craig location) has closed. Apparently a Razzyfresh is going in there, part of the expanding empire of frozen yogurt.

Hello Long Beach and Pasadena

2010-07-15T07:59:00.002-05:00

A shout-out to all my readers in Southern California.

WUMB #81, 79, 77

2010-06-29T11:43:00.002-05:00

#81 Kate Wolf, Gold in California. This is a two-CD set of songs she recorded from 1975 to 1985 and that she put together before her death in 1987. Another of the California singer-songwriters with a pretty voice. And another singer-songwriter who died young.

#79 Willie Nelson, Country Music (Rounder Records, 2010). It's Willie Nelson. I don't think he needs an introduction. This CD is a good sampler.

#77 Bruce Cockburn, Life Short, Call Now (Rounder Records, 2006). Without the comma it would seem to be about the life of a medical resident. He likes repetitive lyrics, but that's ok because they can be effective.

Moshe Greenberg, z"l

2010-05-17T16:56:00.003-05:00

I learned today through the H-Judaic mailing list that Moshe Greenberg passed away.
Professor Greenberg was Professor of Bible at the University of Pennsylvania and then at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for many years. You can read a brief biography by his student and successor at Penn, Jeffrey Tigay, here.

I met Prof. Greenberg in 1993 when I audited his course on medieval Hebrew bible commentary at Hebrew University. It was a course taught in the Bible department aimed mainly at undergraduate Bible majors. I was taking courses for a year after graduating college to fill in some gaps, improve my Hebrew, and prepare myself for graduate study in Jewish history. The class consisted of about 20 undergraduate Bible majors and me. I could keep up with the lectures and class discussion (in Hebrew) but the level of knowledge of the biblical text by the other students floored me. On the other hand, they knew almost nothing about medieval Jewish intellectual history. Prof. Greenberg knew my situation but spoke to me only in Hebrew, even after class.

After I had enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, Prof. Greenberg came (back) to Philadelphia as a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. He greeted me warmly--in English--and asked me about my studies. Later that year, he spoke to some graduate students and told the following story in response to a question about how he had embarked on his career as a Bible scholar:

He (Prof. Greenberg) had travelled around Mexico the summer before his freshman year at Penn. He had fallen in love with the Spanish language and when he got back to Philadelphia he went straight to the chair of the Romance Languages department and declared his intention to major in Spanish. But, he explained to the chair, his love was for the language--its structure and its history--not necessarily the literature, so with whom should he study Spanish philology and linguistics? Ah, exclaimed the chair of the department, we have no one right now who does historical linguistics or the kind of philology that you describe. What other languages do you know, asked the chair to the freshman. Hebrew was the answer Ah, said the chair, then you are in luck: Professor Speiser in Oriental Studies is a first-rate philologist and linguist. Why don't you go see him?

Rest in peace, Professor Greenberg.

Robert Paul Wolf's Memoirs

2010-05-17T16:45:00.002-05:00

Have you been reading them? If not, why not?

Here.

Music for the rainy season

2010-05-17T16:30:00.002-05:00

More selections from the WUMB list, courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

#88 Dave Alvin, West of the West: Songs from California Songwriters. Yep Roc Records (2006). All songs by California songwriters... “you’ve gotta get a gimmick,” I guess. But gimmicks aside, some of the songs are great. And who wouldn’t like a kind of folkish easy listening version of “Surfer Girl”?

#87 Carrie Newcomer, The Geography of Light. Rounder Records (2008). Nice voice; good guitar playing. And interesting lyrics. I am especially impressed with the ever-more-inventive ways that songwriters come up with ways to make romantic love seem deeply philosophical.

#85 Bill Morrissey, Standing Eight. Rounder Records (1989). This is the kind of singer-songwriter New England folk vibe I like (and thought I would get more of from WUMB listeners...maybe as I go farther up the list). I particularly enjoyed his "Party at the UN" which was a Tom-Lehreresque break from the usual laments about things that singer-songwriters lament: "Israelis with uqeleles form a dance band." That is a brilliant lyric.

#84 Loreena McKennitt, The Olive and the Cedar. A Mediterranean Odyssey . Quinlan Road Limited (2009). My first thought as the opening track began was “not my cup of mint tea.” But she has a beautiful voice and I could appreciate some of the eclectic blending of folkish music sung in English with Mediterranean rhythms and instruments.

#83 Brooks Williams, Little Lions. Signature Songs(2000). If you like instrumental guitar, enjoy.

Eclectic music selection for grading papers

2010-05-04T12:30:00.002-05:00

What I've been listening to the last few days:

Pete Seeger (WUMB #25). Had to skip ahead on my WUMB list when I saw that the recording from the Carnegie Hall Concert from 1963 was available in the library: We Shall Overcome. The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert. Historic Live Recording. June 8, 1963. CBS Records (1989). Happened to listen to this yesterday before I learned it was Pete Seeger’s birthday.

Iris DeMent (WUMB #90) My Life. Warner Brothers (1994). Kind of folksy; kind of country-y.

Hesperion XXI, led by Jordi Savall. Diáspora Sefardí Alia Vox (1999). Good to listen to while reading research papers on historical novels and films set in medieval Spain or the “diáspora Sefardí.”

And a recording of the Magic Flute [Die Zauberflöte] from the chorus and orchestra of the Bayerischen Runfunk, conducted by Bernard Haitink. EMI Records, 1981. Why not?

And a couple I listened to a while back but didn't get a chance to post:

Jennifer Kimball. (WUMB #89) The only thing I could find by her was one song on Seeds: The Songs of Pete Seeger, Volume 3. Appleseed Recordings (2003).
Track number 5 on disc 2 is her singing Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in English (an arrangement and the English lyrics by Pete Seeger). In the Seeger/Kimball version, it doesn’t sound like liturgical music--probably because the banjo provides the main melody. Overall, this is a great album. A really wide range of songs and voices (with some other WUMB favorites as well).
I learn from her website that she used to perform with Jonatha Brooke as “The Story” and that she is from Cambridge, Mass. and performed with various Boston-area groups in the 80s and 90s. She now seems to perform once a month or so in Boston and in Ireland.

Dave Matthews Band (WUMB #115), Before these Crowded Streets, [1998]
A mixed bag: some of the songs sound the same; and some of the music is technically perfect but repetitive and uninteresting. But there are some songs where the lyrics and music fit and are interesting (e.g. “The Last Stop”).

What to listen to while copy-editing

2010-03-12T13:10:00.002-05:00

More from the WUMB list.

#99 Jonathan Edwards. Have a Good Time for Me (1973; re-issued 2005). Edwards singing the work of other songwriters. The amazing Wikipedia tells me that Jonathan Edwards was living in Western Massachusetts when he made this album. So far as I know, no relation to the other well-known Jonathan Edwards who spent time in Stockbridge.

#97 Paul Brady. on Andy Irvine/Paul Brady with Donal Lunny and Kevin Burke (1981)
Perfect when you’re in the mood for Irish songs and fiddling. I won’t say how often this mood strikes me.

#95 Jimmy LaFave. The only thing I was able to find in Carnegie Library was his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” on Ribbon Highway--Endless Skyway, A Concert in the Spirit of Woody Guthrie (1993).

#94 Eva Cassidy. The CD I found in the CLP system was her Somewhere (2008), one of a number of posthumous releases. I learned from Wikipedia that she died at the age of 33 in 1996 just as her career was taking off. I had never heard of her but apparently she has become quite well known in the last 15 years. A remarkable voice and a wide range on this album: jazz, blues, folk, country/swing, r&b, etc.

#93 The Band. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (1990)
“Recorded Live in Concert!” “Original Artists!” “Original Recordings!” “richly mesmerizing” “redefining American music” “resonate[s] powerfully through our consciousness” Ok, ok. Always enjoyable to listen to these guys but an awful lot of exclamation points and hyperbole here--I thought Canadians didn’t go in for that sort of thing. But they are very popular, as the scratched-up CD from the Moon Township Public Library attests.

#92 Doc Watson Family. The Watson Family from Smithsonian Folkways, 1990. (Recordings originally released in 1963 and 1976.)
“Classic examples of the Anglo-American folk tradition” (according to Jeff Place in the liner notes). Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that classics are always mediated by their transmission and reception history.

#91 Norah Jones. Come Away with Me (2002). This was the debut album of someone who is now a pretty big star (they sell her albums in Starbucks, I think). I have to confess that while the name sounded familiar, I didn’t really know who she was until I started going through the WUMB list, and I know that says something about me. (Ravi Shankar’s daughter? who knew? probably everyone) Pleasant listening while I did some copy-editing yesterday afternoon.

Coffee is yofi, but liquor is quicker.

2010-03-12T10:07:00.004-05:00

(apologies to Ogden Nash and the Hebrew language)

Of course, I am speaking about lectures on the role of these libations in early modern and modern Jewish culture.

Your choice:

Coffee:

Thursday, April 22, 4:00 pm
Jewish Societies and Cultures Seminar, The Harvard Center for the Humanities,
and The Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies present:
"Jews Encounter Coffee in Early Modern Europe"
Robert Liberles, Gerard Weinstock Visiting Professor of Jewish History,
Department of History, Harvard University
Professor of Modern Jewish History at Ben Gurion University, Beersheva, Israel
Harvard University
Harvard Hall, Room 103
Harvard Yard (Near the Johnston Gate)
Cambridge, MA
https://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cjs/events/calendar%20pageLiberles.html
For the Lecture Poster: https://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Ecjs/PDF/Liberles%20Lecture.pdf

Liquor:

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research cordially invites you to the next
Ruth Gay Seminar in Jewish Studies
Tuesday March 23, 2010 ..... Meet the Faculty: 6:00 PM......Seminar
begins: 6:30 PM
Address: Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, New York, NY,
Kovno Room. Refreshments and Meet the Faculty at 6 PM. Seminar at 6:30
PM. ADVANCE REGISTRATION REQUIRED. Call 212-294-6143 or email
fmohrer@yivo.cjh.org
Presenter: GLENN DYNNER, Professor of Judaic Studies, Sarah Lawrence
College; author of 'Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish
Society' (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Moderator and Respondent: MOSHE ROSMAN, Professor of Jewish History,
Bar Ilan University; Horace Goldsmith Visiting Professor of Jewish
Studies, Yale University.
Topic: "JEWISH TAVERNKEEPERS AND LIQUOR TRADERS IN THE 19TH CENTURY
KINGDOM OF POLAND"
By the end of the 18th century, Jews comprised the vast majority of
tavernkeepers in Poland-Lithuania, leasing taverns and distilleries from
the nobility. According to most historians, Polish Jews were driven out
of the liquor trade over the course of the next century. Yet 19th
century archival sources, including an invaluable collection of personal
petitions (kvitlakh) sent to R. Eliyahu Guttmacher, housed in the YIVO
Archives, provide evidence of the continued existence of Polish Jewish
liquor traders, both open and surreptitious. The continued involvement
of Jews in this sector of the Polish economy points to the fact that
traces of the feudal economic system survived amidst a period of rapid
industrialization and modernization.
While Jewish tavernkeeping was vigorously opposed by powerful groups in
Polish society, one crucial group continued to provide them with cover:
the very local Christians they were accused of victimizing. This talk
analyzes the robust but technically illegal Polish Jewish liquor trade
during the 19th century.
This seminar series is named in honor of the historian and scholar Ruth
Gay (1922-2006) and was made possible thanks to a major gift from the
family of Ruth Gay.

Update on my addiction to print media

2010-03-11T16:11:00.002-05:00

This talk show exchange really captures another aspect of the problem.

Thursday Thoughts

2010-03-11T12:22:00.003-05:00

a miscellany:

1. Got coffee this morning at a Dunkin Donuts near my house. Apparently their policy is to call customers "guests." I was tempted to feign shock that they were charging a "guest" for his coffee. Paging Miss Manners and George Orwell to the conference room.

2. While drinking said coffee, I read the March 15, 2010 issue of The Nation. Jon Wiener's cover story "Big Tobacco and the Historicans: A Tale of Seduction and Intimidation" proved to be more about intimidation than seduction. Like everything in The Nation these days, unbelievable (and not in a good way). (Check out the article after that one: Greg Kaufmann, "Friedmanism at the Fed.")
We live in Chelm, folks.

3. Last week on a plane trip, I read through the first issue of The Jewish Review of Books Have you ever read a magazine in which every single article was interesting? Actually, I can't really say this about the first JRB but I would say that I found 20 out of 22 pieces fascinating--which is a pretty high percentage for me. (I won't say which 2 were uninteresting to me--you'll have to guess.)

4. I summoned my strength this morning to rip up an offer from the Wall Street Journal to subscribe for 10 dollars a month. I am trying to fight my addiction to subscribing to print periodicals.

Currently arriving at the house and the office (not including journals that come with memberships in professional organizations, alumni magazines, or house organs of museums, public TV stations, synagogues, and the like):

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (7 days a week) (since 2002)
New York Times (Saturday and Sunday) (since I don't know, forever)
Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle (since 2002)
The New Republic (since mid-1990s; dropped for a while but resumed circa 2003)
The Jewish Quarterly Review (since mid-2000s)
The Atlantic (late 90s; and again since circa 2007)
Cook's Illustrated (2000-2003?; and again since ca. 2008)
The Nation (since ca. 2007)
Mother Jones (since 2008)
The Progressive (since ca. 2008)
The New Yorker (since late 2009)
The New York Review of Books (since beginning of 2010)
The Jewish Review of Books (brand-new)

I'm probably forgetting something. If you look at the dates, you will note a disturbing trend (or heartening if you work in journalism).

We did have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal for a while under a really cheap rate but I let it lapse after Murdoch bought it. (Imagine the junk mail you get if you subscribe to the WSJ and the Nation.) I'm letting The Progressive lapse not over politics per se but just because it is extremely boring, not to mention predictable. And I'll probably take a hiatus from Cook's Illustrated for a while since I make one of their recipes about once every two years. I enjoy reading about how many tries it takes to make the perfect pot roast but there has to be a limit.

WUMB #105, 104, 102, 100

2010-03-02T11:58:00.002-05:00

Quick comments on:

#105 Kingston Trio, Greatest Hits.
It's fun to hear the “beginnings” of the folk movement of the 60s (in the 50s). I listened to this with the kids (well some of this--didn't feel like explaining "The Long Black Veil") and polled them: They prefer the Peter, Paul, & Mary version of “Lemon Tree” (as do I) but they preferred the Kingston Trio’s version of "This Land is my Land." (I prefer Woody Guthrie). We all found their "Charley and the MTA" hard to sing along with although. Yes, we know that they popularized it with their recording of it. But that song has long passed from song-frequently-recorded status to true folk status, in my view. Their "Early Morning Rain" is fantastic.
Again, why are the Kingston Trio not cracking the top 100?

#104 Kate Campbell, "Blues and Lamentations," 2005.
Pretty music but none of it made much of an impression.

#102 Tim O’Brien, "Fiddler’s Green, 2005.
Nice arrangements of traditional songs and ballads, e.g. “Fair Flowers of the Valley”
I also liked his “Early Morning Rain.” Maybe I just like that song.

#100 Mary Black, "Babes in the Woods," 1991.
Includes a very pretty version of Joni Mitchell’s “The Urge for Going.”

Get your Grafton fix...

2010-03-02T10:40:00.002-05:00

here.

I was recently reminded that Anthony Grafton writes occasional columns in the Daily Princetonian. Although focused on Princeton (naturally), he often has interesting comments there on the state of higher education with relevance to other research universities as well.

WUMB #s 111, 108, 107

2010-02-02T13:18:00.003-05:00

For the last week or so, I have been listening off and on (including right now) to (#108) Elvis Costello's new CD, "Secret, Profane, & Sugercane." An Elvis Costello album is always a pleasure from the lyrics to the guitar playing to the singing.

And even though I can't go into details as this is a G-rated blog, his song "Sulpher to Sugarcane" is a lot of fun, in part because of a Pittsburgh reference. I always enjoy the mention of my adopted city of Pittsburgh in popular music: "But now I'm back in Pittsburgh, I might take them up again." Not quite as memorable as "Kathy, I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh..." but still catches my attention. (I also recently was listening to Louis Armstrong's version of "Muskrat Ramble," and I thought he threw in a line about the "Pittsburgh Pirates" coming to town... but I couldn't find any confirmation of this afterward.)

I couldn't get an album by Steve Goodman (#111) out of the library, but I did get hold of a 2003 documentary on DVD, "Live from Austin City Limits" which mixes footage of two of his shows in Austin in the 70's and early 80's with interview footage of him--overlooking Wrigley Field and talking about his song "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request." I have heard plenty of people sing "City of New Orleans" but never the writer himself so that was interesting. Other good stuff here--Goodman was known more as writer than a performer but he did have a certain stage presence.

And finally, I just got "The Dusty Road" out of the library which is a 4-CD set of recordings made by Woody Guthrie (#107) in the 1940s; much of the material was never released. The masters were left in a storage bin of a Brooklyn apartment building for decades and were only released a couple of years ago. Amazing stuff--Guthrie in his prime, a few years before his health began to decline; very clear recordings. If you know and love his music, you will love this collection and if you don't know his music this would be a great place to start. (And of course there is a mention of "Pittsburgh steel" in one of the labor songs.)

In the midst of all this good listening, I recently read this essay by J. Gabriel Boylan in the Nation on changes in the music industry. One of the things we are losing with the MP3-ization of music and the file-by-file purchasing (or stealing) that takes place are all the possibilities of what you can do with the album as material artefact (cf. the codex vs. the electronic book). The Elvis Costello album has liner notes with the lyrics, headed by the name of the song, followed by an old-timey topical sub-head, e.g. "Down Among the Wine and Spirits: Former-Champion Prizefighter Discovers His Name Printed Just Above the Liquor License." And the Woody Guthrie set comes in a little box that looks like an old suitcase, with a thick book explaining the recordings and containing an essay on Guthrie's travels during the Depression--and even two facsimile postcards. You can't get that kind of thing on Youtube.

Last but not least: I am having second thoughts about this whole WUMB project: how seriously should I take a "Top 120" list in which Woody Guthrie doesn't crack the top 100?

"Liberal Republican" didn't used to be an oxymoron

2010-01-26T13:13:00.004-05:00

Rest in peace, Charles Mathias.

WUMB #120: Kate Rusby

2010-01-26T12:39:00.002-05:00

She should be higher on the list--and probably would be if Boston were in England, instead of New England.
Last week, I listened to her 2005 album, "The Girl Who Couldn't Fly." Very pretty folk music, mostly her arrangements of traditional music.

No Sellers

2010-01-25T07:47:00.005-05:00

My neighborhood--reasonably affluent; heavily Jewish and otherwise ethnically diverse; and populated with a lot of academics (near two big research universities)--lost its only general-interest bookstore at the end of 2009 as a major chain pulled out. The rumors are that they were losing too much business to the Internet on the one hand and to a bigger store in their own chain down the road and a competitor up the road in two shopping areas with (gasp!) better parking.

Anyway, the blog for the local Jewish paper put up this photo taken by a local resident.

Difdafti January 2010

2010-01-18T21:00:00.003-05:00

What I browsed last week, from the new book shelves in Hillman Library and from some new books from other libraries brought by PALCI.

A festschrift for Eric Zimmer, edited by Gershon Bacon, Daniel Sperber, and Aharon Gaimoni, title in English: Studies on the History of the Jews of Ashkenaz; title in Hebrew (all the articles are in Hebrew): Meḥkarim be-toldot yehude ashkenaz. (Bar Ilan University Press, 2008) Almost all the articles are on the history of various Ashkenazic minhagim or on conceptualizations of minhagim in halakhic literature. Most of the studies seem to combine fine-grain textual analysis with an attention to larger socio-cultural historical questions.

Last week, I saw the new list of National Jewish Book Awards: Congratulations to Judy Klitzner for the scholarship prize. (I will send you the commemorative trophy.) The next day, I saw her book on the shelf: Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other (Jewish Publication Society, 2009).

Add to the growing literature on time and calendars in early modern Europe an English translation of Max Engammare, On Time, Punctuality, and Discipline in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge University Press); this is an expansion of the French original published in Geneva in 2004 (L’ordre du temps. L’invention de la ponctualité au XVIe siècle.)

Laura Lunger Knoppers and her colleagues have put together an impressive Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. I just wish they had added “in England and Britain” to the title.... Seems to me I’ve mentioned this problem before. To my good friends (who would never make this mistake) and to their colleagues (who might) in English literary and cultural studies, I wish to remind you that England was not the only place to have a “medieval” or “early modern” period or to have (possibly) had a “Renaissance” or “Reformation.”

Elliot Wolfson’s new study of the messianism of Menahem Mendel Schneerson, in Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision (Columbia University Press, 2009) is an impressive close reading of the writings of the late Habad rebbe. Wolfson also has interesting methodological comments on the role that textual analysis can play in studying contemporary religious movements. And it may be the first scholarly work on Kabbalah in which texts by Ronald Reagan are cited.

More on semi-secret messianic movements: Marc David Baer, our sometime colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, has published The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford University Press, 2010). This book is getting lots of attention.

In the history of the book, Adrian Johns placed the issue of trust and authority between readers, printers, and authors on the agenda. So when I saw a new collection on the shelf with the title eTrust: Forming Relationships in the Online World (ed. Karen S. Cook et al; Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), I thought some book historian might want to look at this. It’s part of a series “The Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust” with 13 previous volumes. But brush up on your math before you tackle it.

I notice that the philosopher Thomas Nagel has a new collection of essays, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament (Oxford 2010), including the one that led one philosophy blog to ask whether he has “jumped the shark.”

If you think on-line discussions about religion can get heated, check out sixteenth-century French “literature of vituperation” studied by Antónia Szabari, Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2010).

“Real” religious violence in the past: Jill N. Claster, Sacred Violence: The European Crusades to the Middle East, 1095-1396 (University of Toronto Press, 2009) looks like a very readable survey.

Last week I was also reading P.D. James, Talking about Detective Fiction, where she stresses the importance of the inter-war period as the “Golden Age” of [British] detective fiction. She also suggests that reading novels from this period gives as good a sense of post-WW 1 British anxieties as any social history. But one could look at Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain between the Wars (Viking Press, 2009) for an account of Britons trying to grapple with a sense of impending doom. His starting off point Eric Hobsbawm and friends at Cambridge in 1939 grappling with the idea that they might all die soon.

To the burgeoning literature on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust (in the news this week), one can add Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (Oxford UP 2010). Hastings threads a fine needle--perhaps anticipating the kind of controversy his book might arouse: “In striving to characterize accurately the activities of early Nazi Catholics in and around Munich, the distinction between the internal-ideal and external-historical perspectives helps to navigate around a central conundrum: avoiding the appearance of indicting Catholicism (as an institutional entity or in ideational terms) for the tragic excesses of the Nazis while at the same time recognizing the important and very real role played by Nazi Catholic clergy and laypeople who, acting as Catholics and in pursuit of what they perceived to be a legitimate form of Catholic identity, were indeed central to the stabilization and spread of the early Nazi movement.” (p.179)

Finally, more theoretical food-for-thought for the study of religion. and history in G.E.R. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning, and Innovation (Oxford University Press 2009). People in Religious Studies departments spend a lot of time debating how to define “religion” and often assume that it’s our special cross to bear and that those lucky folks in other fields know just what their subject is. Lloyd argues that folks in philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, art, law, and science all have to think about this also.

Eating in Pittsburgh.

2010-01-17T11:28:00.003-05:00

I've been telling you about places I enjoyed eating on my two trips to LA last fall, but I haven't mentioned any recent hometown dining experiences. (That may tell you how often we eat out at home...)

Had dinner last night at the Quiet Storm Cafe in the Garfield/Friendship/Bloomfield Lawrenceville border region (on Penn Avenue).
We head there with good friends and our several offspring once every six months or so for dinner. The kids like the mac and cheese, the board games, and the pinball machine. The grown-ups love the vegetarian and vegan offerings. My personal favorite is the Cubano sandwich. But I also tried the Reuben last night and enjoyed that as well.

Blog for the Study of the Jewish Book

2010-01-17T11:13:00.003-05:00

This is the "personal" blog. When I see information that might be useful for Jewish historians with an interest in the history of the book, I post to the "Blog for the Study of the Jewish Book."

WUMB #119: Tim Buckley

2010-01-17T09:16:00.001-05:00

Tim Buckley, “Live at the Folklore Center, NYC, March 6, 1967”; released in 2009.
The first time I listened through this last week, I didn’t pay attention to the date and thought he sounds like he’s going for a sound like 1960s folk. And then I looked at the date of the concert and realized that he wasn’t "going for" it, he was in it. Think early Bob Dylan. Particularly striking song on this album: “No Man Can Find the War.

Parents, Children, and Professions

2010-01-12T17:01:00.003-05:00

A few years ago at a meeting of the American [YYY] Association, my wife spoke on a panel of children of practitioners of [YYY] about their experiences growing up around [YYY]. Her twist was the she went into [YYY] like her father and attributes her early interest in the subject to his influence (and that of her mother who studied a cognate field). She also feels that as she gravitated toward this field in her undergraduate and graduate studies she had a better idea of what she was getting into than some of her peers. So this article at Inside Higher Education reporting on a panel of parent-child pairs of historians at the American Historical Association caught my eye. (It might have caught my eye anyway because I know one of the child historians featured, Adam Davis.)

An interesting commonality is that children of [YYY]-ists and children of historians who go into these fields often specialize in different aspects of the field than the parent. This is the case for my wife (we joke about her limited sense of rebellion).

I certainly don't expect that any of my children will become historians, but it is interesting to think that they would have a better sense of what it's all about than I did.

More Historian Detectives

2010-01-12T10:26:00.002-05:00

A couple of years ago I noted that many fictional detectives had backgrounds as historians. At that point, apparently, I hadn't read enough Donna Leon to know that Guido Brunetti had studied history at university (see The Death of Faith.)

Books I read in 2009

2010-01-04T21:33:00.000-05:00

# December, 2009:
# Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
# Josephine Tey, The Singing Sands
# C.B. Greenfield, A Little Madness
# Josephine Tey, To Love and Be Wise
# Donna Leon, the Death of Faith
# Marissa Peisman, Unorthodox Practices

# November, 2009:
# Donna Leon, Acqua Alta
# E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed Up-Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
# Harry Kemelman, The Day the Rabbi Left Town
# Valerie Miner, Murder in the English Department
# Margaret Drabble, The Radiant Way
# Margaret Drabble, The Middle Ground
# Jeffrey Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape
# Lucille Kallen, C.B. Greenfield: The Tanglewood Murder

# October, 2009:
# David Lodge, Deaf Sentence
# Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs
# Cynthia Ozick, Heir to the Glimmering World
# Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends

# September, 2009:
# Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus
# Ruth Langer, To Worship God Properly
# Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone

# August, 2009:
# Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
# P.D. James and T.A. Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree
# Bernard Malamud, Dubin's Lives
# Bernard Malamud, The Assistant
# Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
# Margaret Drabble, Jerusalem the Golden
# Martha Grimes, Help the Poor Struggler
# Martha Grimes, Jerusalem Inn
# Martha Grimes, The Man with a Load of Mischief
#
# July, 2009:
# Robertson Davies, World of Wonders
# Robertson Davies, The Manticore
# Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet
# Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
# Martha Grimes, The Dirty Duck
# Martha Grimes, The Dear Leap
# Margaret Drabble, The Realms of Gold
# Ellis Peters, The Confession of Brother Haluin
# Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel
# John Updike, A Month of Sundays
# Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

# June, 2009:
# Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism
# Mark Mills, The Savage Garden
# Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion
# PD James, The Lighthouse

# May, 2009:
# PD James, Shroud for a Nightingale
# PD James, A Certain Justice
# Carlo Lucarelli, The Damned Season
# Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

# April, 2009:
# Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain
# Iris Murdoch, the Bell
# PD James, Unnatural Causes
# Robin Winks, ed. The Historian as Detective

# March, 2009:
# PD James, Death of An Expert Witness
# PD James, Cover Her Face
# Faye Kellerman, The Mercedes Coffin
# Eric Lax, "Conversations with Woody Allen"

# February, 2009:
# Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose
# PD James, The Black Tower
# Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle
# Faye Kellerman, Street Dreams
# Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
# Faye Kellerman, The Forgotten
# Faye Kellerman, Serpent's Tooth

# January, 2009:
# Jonathan Boyarin, Jewishness and the Human Dimension
# Faye Kellerman, Prayers for the Dead
# David G. Roskies, Yiddishlands: A Memoir
# Georges Simenon, Maigret Stonewalled
# Jack Finney, Time and Again
# E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey
# Lee Goldberg, Mr. Monk is Miserable

Catching up with the WUMB Project

2010-01-04T21:22:00.003-05:00

See earlier posts for an explanation.

#112 is Janis Ian. Remember Janis Ian? Listened to "God and the FBI" and "Breaking Silence" in late December. Good singer-songwriter-folksy political stuff. Nothing profound to say.

Also found a fairly recent CD by Eric Andersen (#109), "Blue Rain," recorded live in 2007 in Oslo. Yes, a famous folk singer (born in Pittsburgh according to Wikipedia) singing the blues in Scandinavia.

"Spring" Term?

2010-01-04T21:20:00.001-05:00

Our semester begins Wednesday. I doubt I will be able to find the weather as congenial as I did at the beginning of the fall term.

Further LA restaurant recommendations:

2009-12-23T21:13:00.004-05:00

#1 Real Food Daily. Very good vegan food. I recommend the "not-chos" and the veggie burger. My dining companions were very enthusiastic about the hemp "ice cream" which tasted a lot like chocolate ice cream. (I myself am not a big chocolate fan but I did appreciate the novelty--to me, anyway, of hemp ice cream.) Thanks to the faithful reader of this blog and distinguished perinatalogist who took me there last night.

#2 If you find yourself near the Century Plaza Hotel or the Westfield Mall and don't want to have lunch in the mall food court (although it may be the nicest mall food court in the world), cross Santa Monica Blvd (carefully) and try Clementine. Many thanks to the distinguished and methodologically astute historian of religion who took a group of us there two days ago. I had a very good tuna melt and side of roasted brussels sprouts.

#3 Similar to Clementine but more like a grocery store than a cafe is Joan's on Third. I enjoyed my salmon cake and roasted brussels sprouts there too (but I do have to say that the brussels sprouts were better at Clementine. But I thank the distinguished dermatologist and astute observer of the world who took me there with his delightful twin daughters on Saturday night.

Suzanne Vega

2009-12-13T13:45:00.002-05:00

Listened to Suzanne Vega (WUMB #114), "Solitude Standing" (1987), while I drank my mid-morning coffee Friday and went through e-mails. I was in a Cathedral but could hear no bells.

Jimmy Buffet and Chris O'Brien

2009-12-10T09:26:00.002-05:00

Yesterday's CD was Jimmy Buffet, "Jimmy Buffet Live! Feeding Frenzy" (1990)--that's what was in the Carnegie Library in Oakland yesterday. Mr. Margaritaville was #117 on the WUMB list. What can I say? It's Jimmy Buffet. This was a live concert recording and the opening bit where he channels Mel Brooks and/or Carl Reiner is strange--maybe it worked better on stage. With the wind blowing outside, this was not a bad accompaniment to dish-washing, flashlight checking, and reading.

My favorite song on the album was his version of "Jamaica Farewell" (aka "Kingston Town"), although overall I prefer Harry Belafonte.

Today's artist is #116 on the WUMB list--a relative newcomer, Boston-based singer-songwriter Chris O'Brien. He has two CD's out apparently but neither is in the Allegheny County library network. (He did play two concerts in Pittsburgh in the last year, though.) So I'm listening this morning to some of the sample songs on his website. So far, so good. Reminds me a little of Mark Erelli.

And a great line in his song "Rosa": "I'd have followed her to Boston." Now that's true love!

Singer of the Day: Priscilla Herdman

2009-12-08T10:30:00.003-05:00

Priscilla Herdman comes in at #118 on the WUMB list.
CD: Daydreamer, 1993.

Children's songs in a folkish mode by Herdman and a number of others.
Listening at home now without the kids and enjoying it. Some cutesy stuff ("Ticklish Tom and Pickeldy Pie" but also a lovely version of "What a Wonderful World."

The WUMB Top 120 Project

2009-12-08T10:25:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago, WUMB in Boston released its list of the top 120 singers as voted by listeners on their website. A friend of ours and an excellent singer-songwriter was voted number 27. If you look at the list, you'll see he's in some pretty good company.

So I decided to print the list and try over the next few months to listen to at least one CD from each of the top 120... I won't go in exact order because I'm getting the CD's from the public library system and not all are available at the same time.

Two good restaurants in LA

2009-11-08T19:38:00.002-05:00

Just got back from a short trip to LA for a small workshop. We had two excellent dinners at:

Jitlada Thai

and La Seranata de Garibaldi

Jitlada seems like it would be a well kept secret except that apparently (as my friend in LA who reads more periodicals than I do--which is quite a feat--tells me) has been discovered by LA's leading food writer.

High turnout/low turnout?

2009-11-03T17:54:00.002-05:00

I was voter 101 in my precinct at 3:20 pm today. Is that high or low for an off-year election with judge races and a mayoral race with an incumbent running?

A Chicagoan's View of Squirrel Hill

2009-11-03T13:02:00.001-05:00

Always interesting to see what a visitor thinks about one's neighborhood:
http://hydeparkprogress.blogspot.com/2009/09/squirrel-hill-vs-hyde-park.html

He marvels at the mostly full storefronts. Good thing he came before Panera closed and Barnes and Noble announced their closing.

On the other hand: a kosher Dunkin' Donuts has opened. As an acquaintance said to me the other day--this is either great or terrible.

Happy New Academic Year

2009-08-31T12:43:00.003-05:00

Many universities, including my own, begin today. And it is currently 65 degrees (F) and sunny here in Pittsburgh.

Let's hear from the Reverend Professor Simon Darcourt:

"Autumn, to me the most congenial of seasons: the University, to me the most congenial of lives. In all my years as a student and later a university teacher I have observed that university terms tend to begin on a fine day."

(Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels, 1981).

Some thoughts I had In Europe last week (in no particular order)

2009-07-14T11:57:00.003-05:00

1. Europeans do not dress in special clothes to ride bicycles.

2. If you spend time in small cities in Italy and Germany where hardly anyone knows English and then go to Paris, it will seem like everyone in Paris is speaking English.

3. It is strange to find it easier to understand a 30 minute academic lecture in Italian than instructions on how to use the telephone in the hotel room.

4. There was more leg room in coach on my hour flight from Paris to Milan than on my seven hour flight from Pittsburgh to Paris.

5. It is possible to arrive too early for a flight in Europe.

6. I was upset when my train from Milan to Mantua was canceled and I had to wait two hours for the next one until I remembered that if a train from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia were canceled, one would have to wait until the next day for the next one.

7. Most people would not take a copy of every single newspaper available for free in the waiting area of the airport.

8. European airlines have not yet figured out how to cut costs like American airlines and I am happy about that. (This was a thought I had while reading my free copies of the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal Europe, the Financial Times, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Corriere della Serra, and El Pais in the Paris airport waiting for my flight to Milan.)

9. I will never master the subtleties of when to tip and how much to tip in Italy.

10. Mantua is a little hard to get to but tortelli di zucca makes it worth it.

11. I eat a lot of things at hotel breakfasts that I don't eat for breakfast at home.

12. Why do hotels put up environment-friendly notices advising guests to hang up towels that don't need to be replaced with a new one--and then fail to have enough hooks or bars to hang the towels?

13. It would be helpful to have the city map before getting to the hotel.

Slow news day at the Post-Gazette?

2009-06-23T09:50:00.001-05:00

For this I have an RSS feed to the local paper?

Important breaking news here.

Bloomsday post redux

2009-06-16T20:06:00.003-05:00

One of my favorite postings--in honor of Bloomsday 2006--here.

Given the Steelers and Penguins victories and the upcoming G20 summit, I am sure that Pittsburgh is the omphalos.

More misc. frivolity

2009-06-09T13:09:00.002-05:00

I jotted this down on a scrap of paper about a year ago and it turned up at the bottom of a pile of unfiled papers today. I think it may be my favorite sentence ever to appear in a movie review:

"Let me blunt: 'You Don't Mess with the Zohan' is the finest post-Zionist action-hairdressing sex comedy I have ever seen."
--A.O. Scott in the New York Times, June 6, 2008.

In which I feel the urge to write a bad poem about a current news story...

2009-05-26T21:09:00.003-05:00

On the contretemps over the Oxford Professorship of Poetry.

An unusual academic event; the press looks for a handle.
Trading in gossip; electioneering run amok; a scandal.
One is out for [alleged] impropriety.
The other resigns for the good of society.
I myself feel a distinct lack of piety.
The post is open again.
I nominate Gervase Fen.

Re-use, fix... if you have an in-home service plan

2009-05-26T19:41:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago, the screen on the Dell notebook I am currently typing on went a little crazy (wavy lines) and then blank. (A computer's version of a migraine?) I panicked. Then I turned on my wife's computer, went on-line, and followed the suggestion of someone on some website to plug the computer into an external monitor. I dragged the monitor from our old desktop to my desk, plugged in the computer and all seemed well, or at least, I could stop panicking because it clearly wasn't my hard drive dying.

Of course, I still had no screen. I was too busy then, in the middle of the semester, to deal with it, so I just worked on the external monitor for a few days until--out of the blue--the screen came back. So when it died again last week, I didn't panic. Instead I hooked up the trusty CRT and fiddled with the screen a little. And it came back soon enough. But when the screen did cut out again a day later, I did call Dell.

First pleasant surprise: I was on hold for about 5 minutes and the first human I spoke to could handle the whole call.

Second pleasant surprise: I figured that I would be told that the cost of fixing all this on a two-year-old laptop would be more than the cost of a new computer.

But I had forgotten that I had an extended in-home service plan. Today, my daughter and I watched a man take apart the entire computer at our dining room table, install a new motherboard and a new screen, and unscrew and screw about 6000 tiny screws in the process. Toward the end of this, he turned to me and said, I guess you have an extended service plan, huh? Yep, I said. Yes, he said, because if you didn't, this would be costing you somewhere around a $1000 for parts and labor.

Given that a new notebook costs somewhere around half of that, nobody without the service plan is going to repair the old computer. My guess is that Dell makes a good deal of money off the service plans. And I know that these service plans are usually a bad idea. But I have to say that I liked having the problem fixed without having to transfer all of my files to a new computer. Plus it was interesting to see the inside of the computer.

New Urbanism meet Old Suburbanism

2009-05-25T08:38:00.002-05:00

In keeping with my late May tradition on this blog (see here for 2005 and here for 2007), I offer a few comments on urban planning and design.

I live not far from a new housing development called Summerset that bills itself as a "new traditional neighborhood." It's being built on a former slag heap, on the southern edge of Squirrel Hill, an old traditional neighborhood here in the East End of Pittsburgh. At the moment, it's accessible through only one entrance which is a short drive but a longish walk from the main routes through the neighborhood. One bus route runs into the development. The plan is to build out the main road of the development, Parkview Blvd, to a larger road, Brown's Hill Road, which has more bus routes, and is a short walk from shopping at the Waterfront (across the river in Homestead) and shopping in Greenfield, an adjoining neighborhood.

In addition, a new shopping complex, called Walnut Place, has recently been built at the future intersection of Brown's Hill Rd and Parkview Blvd and just a few yards from Old Brown's Hill Road where there is a larger senior-citizen housing complex. And construction work will begin soon on pedestrian and road improvements on Brown's Hill Road. See here for the Post-Gazette story.

Residents of Summerset will soon be able to walk out Parkview Blvd to Brown's Hill Road, catch a bus or walk into a Dunkin Donuts, a hair place, an IHOP, a fitness center, etc. Likewise, residents of southern part of Squirrel Hill and some parts of Greenfield will be able to walk down the hill to the same stores. And the more active seniors on Old Brown's Hill Road will be able to walk a short distance to those same stores and restaurants.

So far so good, right?

I decided the other day to take the short walk down the hill and see the new development and the pre-improvement streetscape. And I noticed one thing that disturbed: so far there is no clear pedestrian access to the Walnut Place shopping center from Brown's Hill Road. The only clear way in to both sides of the center is on an access road into the parking lots with no sidewalks. Now maybe, just maybe, the next phase of the plan will include pedestrian access from the adjoining streets--Brown's Hill Rd, Parkview Blvd, and Saline St (behind the complex). But I saw no evidence of this and the landscaping didn't give any indication that this is on tap.

In other words, residents of the "new traditional neighborhood" and the old traditional neighborhoods nearby will be able to walk to a traditional suburban shopping center and will have to walk through shrubbery or on a parking lot access road to approach the new stores and restaurants.

Information Literacy and the Nation

2009-04-21T15:30:00.002-05:00

Lately, I've been trying to get students to appreciate the difference between gathering information and doing historical research that involves not only information gathering, but also interpretation.

This new book looks like it might help and it's on my reading list for the summer.

But one thing I might do next time I teach is start a conversation by asking students to comment on this brief exchange in the "Letters" section of this week's Nation (May 4, 2009, pp. 2,24--good luck finding it on-line):

A reader in New York writes:
"Christine Smallwood states that Elaine Showalter's book A Jury of Her Peers is the first literary history of American female authors... Frederick Ungar published American Womean Writers... [in the early 1980s]."

Elaine Showalter's response, quoted by Christine Smallwood:
"Jury of Her Peers is a narrative literary history, covering 350 years in twenty chapters and told by a single author with a point of view. The Ungar volumes, on the other hand, are critical reference guides comprising brief entries on many women writers, written by a range of contributors and arranged alphabetically."

Pittsburgh Symphony Rachmaninoff Festival Advisor Also Excellent Sales Rep

2009-04-21T14:45:00.003-05:00

Saturday night, on our way to the finale of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Rachmaninoff Festival, my wife and I ate dinner at Christos, an excellent Greek restaurant in downtown Pittsburgh. The food is good (try the Jackie Onassis cake for dessert), but the most interesting part of the place in my view is how close the tables are to each other. At the beginning of our meal, two men sitting at the next table were having a lively and seemingly informed conversation about Rachmaninoff and other Russian composers of the twentieth century. Since we were nearly sitting in their laps, I couldn't help but overhear the conversation and wondered who they were. As one got up to pay the bill, I casually asked the one sitting down whether they were on their way to the concert.

It turns out that our (near) table companions were the artistic consultant and curator for the festival, Joseph Horowitz, and the classical music reviewer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Mark Kanny.

Joseph Horowitz asked us--innocently and out of curiosity, I suppose--whether we were subscribers. We responded with guffaws. In fact, as we explained, we are subscribers, but have been debating whether to renew our subscription for next year. I pushed us to subscribe this year because I love orchestral music and despite our best intentions we just weren't getting organized to go to individual concerts. Three Fiddlesticks concerts (for kids) and two weekends at Tanglewood just wasn't enough for me. My wife--who has a much deeper classical music background than I do, by the way--likes orchestral music but prefers chamber music and also has felt that 6 or 7 classical concerts will crowd out other cultural events given our limited babysitting budget (she has been correct, actually). And we haven't even made it to all the concerts this year--we missed one because of a last-minute babysitter cancellation, another because of a last-minute kid illness. So in the last few weeks we have been close to a decision not to renew.

Then Joseph Horowitz, formerly of the New York Times and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and leading American musicologist, asked another simple and presumably innocent question: how much were subscriptions? Well, we answered, our 7-concert series in the Heinz Hall bleachers (excuse me, the gallery) is about 200 for two tickets. It was at that moment that we realized that each concert was about $14 a person.

After Messrs. Horowitz and Kanny left us for the pre-concert talk and we dug into our spanakopita and stuffed peppers, we revisited the matter and concluded that a) we can spend $200 on a single shopping trip at Costco, Target, or Giant Eagle; and b) that even if we don't make it to every concert we can donate the unused tickets to the orchestra. We could also relieve my guilt feelings about not renewing the subscription during a recession.

Dear reader: on Monday I sent in the renewal form.

In other words, Joseph Horowitz not only put together an excellent Rachmaninoff Festival for the PSO and its audience, but also convinced at least two subscribers to renew.

Difdafti in mid-late February

2009-02-27T07:27:00.003-05:00

What caught my eye on the new book shelf from roughly February 10 to earlier this week:

John Haldon, ed. A Social History of Byzantium (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Hardly any mention of Jews except for a brief mention of 12th-century Jewish silk weavers in one essay.

I've been interested in Margaret Mead for a while since I learned she was friendly with the founders of the progressive private school I went to as a kid and that she designed my fifth-grade social science curriculum, "MACOS" i.e. "Man a Course of Study," but we were in fifth grade so of course we called it "Mucus." So it was interesting to page through Nancy Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon (Princeton UP, 2008) which is not a biography of Mead (there are plenty of those) but an exploration of the history of (biography of) Mead's public image. No mention of my fifth-grade social studies curriculum, however.

I've noticed a lot of books on J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter lately. The one on the new book shelf a couple of weeks ago was Dedria Bryfonski, ed. Political Issues in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series (Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2009). Some of the essays criticize Rowling for portraying racism or classism which I find odd in that the authors seem to assume that representations of social inequality in literature represent an endorsement of such inequality. Perhaps one can make a case that we ought to avoid such representatons in children's literature, but I find the premise odd. Was Dickens in favor of "Dickensian" social conditions? In the case of the Harry Potter books, one of the most compelling aspects to my mind is the deftness with which Rowling portrays the magical world as very much like our own. The wizards and witches have to contend with bureaucracy, elitism, family squabbles, etc--just as we muggles do. One might say that the magical world seems behind our own in race relations (e.g. the treatment of the house elves; the notion of half-bloods) and social hierarchies--indeed much of the books' political atmosphere and major conflicts put me in mind of the politics of the 1930s and not the 1990s--but perhaps Rowling's implicit point is that the magicians are behind the muggles.... recall Mr. Weasly's fascination with muggle technology.

Leaving that aside (because I can't make a seamless transition), I also ran across:

Naftali Rothenberg, Wisdom of Love: Man, Woman, and God in Jewish Canonical Literature from the relatively new Academic Studies Press in Boston.

Nurit Stadler, Yeshiva Fundamentialism: Piety, Gender, and Resistance in the Ultra-Orthodox World (NYU Press, 2009) which my quick skim suggests is a remarkable ethnography. N.B. she means the "Ultra-Orthodox World" in Israel.

Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, eds. The Golden Rule: The Ethics of Reciprocity in World Religion (Continuum, 2008). The collection of essays includes contributions on Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Greco-Roman religion, in addition to biblical Israel, rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

Carla Mazzio's The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (UPenn Press, 2009) goes on my pile for later reading, especially ch. 1 with its intriguing title "The Renaissance of Mumbling." N. B. Mazzio means "The Inarticulate [English] Renaissance."

Still in the LC "PR" range: Ruth Mack, Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, 2009) suggests a rethinking of the development of historical consciousness.

A quick look at Tracy Davis, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (Cambridge UP, 2008) to see if it would offer insight into the popularity of "performance" as a concept in the humanities right now. The introduction has some comment on this.

Dan Diner's Lost in the Sacred: Why The Muslim World Stood Still now translated to English and out from Princeton UP (2009) is likely to be controversial and is something that I will return to for a more thorough reading later. The chapter on "Text and Speech" deals with the important (to my mind) question of orality and textuality.

Finally, there seems to be a renaissance of interest in the intellectual world of Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem between the world wars. In the space of two weeks, three books have appeared:

Benjamin Lazier's God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton UP, 2008).

A new English translation of Stephane Moses (I can't make the accents work in Blogspot), The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem (Stanford UP, 2009). This was originally published in French in 1992.

And Asher D. Biemann, Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism

And very soon, I understand, we will have Mara Benjamin's new assessment of Rosenzweig's Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge, 2009, forthcoming)

With the publication of David Myers' assessment of "historicism and its discontents in German-Jewish thought" a few years ago (Reisisting History, Princeton, 2003) and with the Rosenzweig and Benjamin-Scholem industries experiencing no slowdown in production, our understanding of the interesting intellectual reflections by European Jews in the 1920s and 1930s has been enriched quite a lot in the last decade. The question of why this period is so fascinating is also of interest, but I'll save that for another day. (I should point out that Myers and Biemann are also interested in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. I think there is a good case to be made for considering this longer time span in order to really assess the impact of WW1.)

A cautionary note

2009-02-23T20:28:00.003-05:00

"More than ever Grant wondered with what part of their brains historians reasoned. It was certainly by no process of reasoning known to ordinary mortals that they arrived at their conclusions. Nowhere in life had he met any human being remotely resembling either Dr. Gairdner's Richard or Oliphant's Elizabeth Woodville."
Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time, Scribner paperback edition, 1995, p.173.

Correction/Clarification

2009-02-17T11:06:00.003-05:00

It occurs to me that I am not really a bibliomaniac, in the precise (clinical) sense.

Diary of a Bibliophile: My Trip to New York to see the Valmadonna Trust Library

2009-02-16T21:48:00.003-05:00

The Valmadonna Trust Library is--without any doubt--the greatest private collection of early printed Hebrew books ever assembled. In size and scope, it also rivals the largest and most famous public collections of Hebrew books such as those of the National Library of Israel (formerly the Jewish National and University Library) in Jerusalem, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the British Library in London , and the Jewish Theological Seminary Library in New York.

The collection is largely the product of a lifetime of collecting by one man, Jack Lunzer, a now-retired diamond 1merchant born in Antwerp. Mr. Lunzer’s wife’s family had assembled a moderately large collection of Hebrew books printed in Italy and he began to add to the collection starting in the 1950s, expanding the scope of the collection to include Hebrew books (and books in other languages with Hebrew type in them) from every place in Europe, Asia, and Africa that had a Hebrew printing industry.

The collection--now in the range of 13,000 books--has been housed for decades in the Lunzer home in London, available to scholars, but very much a private collection. I have known about the collection for several years from the footnotes of my colleagues and from conversations about books. I met Mr. Lunzer two years ago at a conference and a few weeks later received in the mail a photocopy of the opening pages from the first edition of Judah Halevi’s Book of the Kuzari, a twelfth-century philosophical text whose reception I had been researching.

Until last week, that is about what I knew of the collection. I should say, however, that I didn’t know the size of the collection. If you had asked me, I think I would have guessed that the collection consisted of a few thousand volumes, 3000 or 4000 at the most.

Tuesday February 10

I have an e-mail from David Wachtel, a librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a consultant on Hebrew books to Sothebys, whom I’ve known for years. He wants me to publicize an exhibition of the Valmadonna Trust collection at Sothebys’ New York office on a blog I maintain for Jewish book studies. I open the attachments and am stunned to learn of the size of the collection, that it is being sold as one lot (I breathe a sigh of relief at the wisdom of the family not to break up this collection), and that the entire collection will be on view at Sothebys. How does one display 13,000 books?
I also learn that the asking price is $40 million and that Mr. Lunzer hopes that a major American library (like the Library of Congress) will buy it.
David tells me that it will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience to come see it. But who has time or money to go to New York.

Wednesday February 11

I post the information on the blog (http://studythejewishbook.blogspot.com/2009/02/david-wachtel-writes-valmadonna-trust.html) and continue my daily web-surfing. I come to the New York Times site and find Edward Rothstein’s review of the exhibition. The accompanying photos give me a sense of how the collection is displayed.

Thursday February 12
I’ve had an e-mail exchange with a colleague in Philadelphia over something else and I casually mention that the Valmadonna exhibit looks interesting and ask him whether he plans to go up to New York to see it. He replies that I ought to go--don’t spare any expense--for an absolutely “breathtaking” experience. He likens seeing this collection to seeing the whole of the Jewish people gathered in one place at one time. Hyperbole but I know this scholar well enough to take him seriously.

I broach the subject with my wife who is indulgent: check the frequent flier miles and the flights--maybe you can make a day trip, she says. She is right--we have oodles of USAir miles sitting around. As they cut back in Pittsburgh, what’s the use of hanging on to the miles? Lo and behold, I can go up for day trip on Sunday with direct flights. Last-minute ticketing costs an extra $50 but this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, right? Plus my wife’s parents are coming to town for the holiday weekend so I’m not leaving her all alone to deal with kids. I’m in.

Friday February 13
Second thoughts: who goes to New York for an afternoon to look at books?
I e-mail my sister and make lunch plans. She agrees I am nuts but she is my little sister and has known this for years. I e-mail a college friend and make plans to see him after the exhibit closes on my way back to the airport. He saw the article in the Times and thought of me, so he’s not entirely surprised. I notice that the Times article was one of the most e-mailed and worry that Sunday afternoon at Sothebys will be crowded. Then I remember that we are talking about a rare book exhibit--how crowded can it be?

Saturday February 14
Just before going to bed, I fill in the little box on Facebook with “Adam is going to New York tomorrow to look at 13,000 books. Really.” By Sunday morning, there is a comment from a friend in Israel asking me if I’m putting in a bid. This is not the first joke I will hear along these lines.

Sunday February 15
The big day. On the plane, I think of some other witty things to say about going to the exhibit and not having $40 million. The best one I come up with is: “I looked through all the couch cushions last night and still couldn’t come up with enough.” Not very good.

I’m on the left-side of the plane and we take a flight path into La Guardia across New Jersey with a sharp turn at Staten Island. It’s a clear day and I can see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, then Lower Manhattan. After a few minutes, we are flying right over the globe from the 1939 World’s Fair, past the new baseball stadium for the Mets and then into La Guardia. Platitudes about the Jewish books from London coming to the city and country that welcomed the Jewish people fill my head.

We land on-time at La Guardia. I make good time with a bus and then a subway and then a nice walk in the rare February sunshine and I’m on the Upper East Side by late morning. A nice lunch with sister, brother-in-law, and their toddler son. As we leave the restaurant, they decline to bring Max to the exhibit fearing that he will put a rare book in his mouth. I make a joke about then having to buy the whole lot. I make my other joke about the couch cushions.

They hug me, give me looks of pity, and send me on my way down York Avenue to Sothebys. It’s a few minutes after 1 pm and the exhibition hours are 1-5 pm on Sunday.

As I approach Sothebys, I fall in step behind a modern Orthodox family (judging from dress and the type of kippah on the father’s head), a mother, a father, a teenage daughter. A block away I see several other men in kippot heading into the building. I start to wonder about the size of the crowd again.

My coat is checked and I’m upstairs to the 10th floor of Sotheby’s by 1:15. A number of people are milling around. I see David Wachtel at the entrance. We promise to catch up later but for now he is going to give a tour along with the other curator, Sharon Mintz, to begin at 1:30. I decided to make an overview loop before the tour begins. At 1:30 I head David’s booming voice (which became less booming over the course of the afternoon) gathering the tour group and splitting them in half. I am in the first room when the group comes in. In 15 minutes, the crowd has swelled. I estimate 200 people follow David into the room. There is no place to stand. I move quickly to the next room.

The crowd builds over the rest of the afternoon. David and Sharon run tours nearly continously. Later, David will introduce me to the head of the book department at Sothebys, David Redden, who is marvelling at the size of the crowd. Bigger than the crowd for an exhibit of Impressionist paintings he tells me.

The exhibit is brilliantly laid out. The first room is quite large with floor to ceiling bookshelves displaying nearly the entire collection. Every so often, a book is open but the rest sit on the shelves as in a library. Each shelf is labeled with the name of a city and books printed in that city are gathered near the name plate. But the collection’s scope is so large that not all the cities can be mentioned. Venice takes up a quarter of the room; Amsterdam, perhaps an eighth. Next to Amsterdam are cities in the Low Countries, France, and Germany. Across a doorway from Venice is another quarter of the room taken up with the other cities in Italy. The final quadrant are cities in the Middle East and India. There are not many name tags for cities in Eastern Europe leading to rumblings around the room that the collection is weak in those areas. Prague and Cracow are represented however with named shelves and I overhear David telling his tour group that all the cities of Eastern Europe have imprints in the collections. He points to shelves near the ceiling running the length of the room. An oversight of the designer not to have labels with Zhitomir and Vilna, perhaps. One of the few oversights.

To the right is a small alcove with a complete edition of the Bomberg Talmud laid out in display cases. Daniel Bomberg is a name familiar to every lover of the Jewish book. A Christian printer from Antwerp--Lunzer’s hometown--who settled in Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Bomberg was responsible for many crucial Hebrew publishing projects. In 1517, he produced the first Biblia Rabbinica, an edition of the Hebrew Bible with key commentaries printed surrounding the biblical text. This was the launching of the standard format of the Jewish study Bible until today--the so-called “Mikraot Gedolot” [Great Bibles]: text in the middle; commentaries surrounding. His next great project was the printing of the Babylonian Talmud. Gershom Soncino and other pioneers of Hebrew printing had printed individual tractates but Bomberg was the first to produce an edition of the entire work, in several large folio volumes. If one has seen any edition of the Talmud, one can recognize Bomberg’s influence: the standard pagination (still used today), the text with the two main commentaries, Rashi and the “Tosafot” on either side. The Tosafot is really an anthology of comments by a school of rabbis in France and Germany in the 12th and 13th centuries. They were never edited and different versions of comments circulated in manuscripts in the Middle Ages. Bomberg’s editors, a group of Venetian rabbis, selected the “best” comments and created the Tosafot as we have it today. Generations of yeshiva students owe the foundaitons of their curriculum to a publishing project instituted by a Christian printer.

A really good Judaica collection may have a volume or two of this edition, but the earliest printed editions of the Talmud are quite rare, especially Italian editions, many of whose copies were burnt in 1553 under orders from the Pope. The Valmadonna Trust has a complete edition. And what a story behind this acquisition: The Bomberg Talmud in this collection was acquired from Westminster Abbey in 1980. In 1956, Jack Lunzer saw an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert museum that displayed one of the volumes. He quickly learned that Westminster Abbey had a complete Bomberg Talmud edition--shipped from Venice and bound at Oxford for the kings’ collection. The king was Henry VIII and legend has it that the copies were ordered in the midst of his divorce from Catherine of Aragon when (this part we are more sure about) his advisors consulted some rabbis on the Talmudic laws of divorce. By the time the books were bound, however, the marriage had been dissolved and the English Reformation had begun. The books were sent to Westminister Abbey and set, gathering dust, until the 1950s.

Beginning in 1956, Lunzer began a negotiation with Abbey officials to acquire the edition for his library. He knew that the Abbey would not part with such a prize easily and he presented the Abbey with many offers of swaps--the Valmadonna Trust would purchase books and manuscripts related to the Abbey’s collection and offer them in trade. Rebuffed for many years, Lunzer finally had success when the original 900-year-old charter of Westminster Abbey came on the market. The Valmadonna Trust purchased the charter and presented it to Westminster Abbey in exhange for the Talmud edition.

I love the story--and enjoyed hearing Jack Lunzer himself tell the tale on a video presentation playing on the other side of the exhibit when I got over there later in the afternoon.

From the main room, I passed into a smaller room with display cases, housing the incunabula of the collection. “Incunabula”--deriving from the Latin for “cradle”--is the technical term for books printed before 1500, i.e. books from the infancy of printing in the West. There are about 140 known Hebrew incunable editions. That is, extant today in the world’s libraries, are copies of about 140 Hebrew books printed before 1500. The Valmadonna Trust owns about 70. I knew this library had a great incunabula collection, but I did think “wow” when I walked into this room and realized I was seeing half of the known Hebrew incunabula displayed before me.

Some of these earliest Hebrew books were old friends, but I enjoyed seeing them again. One of the first books I see here is The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow by Judah Messer Leon. This guide to Hebrew rhetoric, applying classical rhetoric to the Hebrew Bible, was printed in Mantua in 1477 and has the distinction of being the first Hebrew book printed in the lifetime of its author. I’ve seen a copy of this at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, a marvelously quirky library and museum (among other things, it owns the manuscript for Joyce’s Ulysses and the entire contents of the living room from Marianne Moore’s Greenwich Village apartment), but it’s been a while.

I had never seen what may be the first Hebrew printed book ever, a copy of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed printed in Rome in the late 1560s or early 1570s. Some of the Bible editions printed in Spain before 1492 and in Portugal before 1497 (when Jews there were forcibly converted to Christianity) with commentaries on the side anticipate Bomberg’s later achievements in Venice.

Standing in this room, I hear my name called out. A colleague from Yale is here with his wife and small children. So far as I can tell, his children have not tried to eat any of the books. A few minutes later I see the former librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Later, I will run into scholars from Yeshiva University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Among the Jewish studies academics milling around, I seem to have come the farthest.

The casual talk is over who will buy the collection: names of prominent universities in the northeastern United States are mentioned (I won’t mention names here). Some think nobody will step up in this economic climate. Others think it’s a relative bargain--when the economy recovers, it may be valued at more than $40 million.

I stand next to two young women who are talking about the expurgation and the marginalia in a commentary on Psalms by David Kimhi. I lean in and take a closer look. I think the marginalia are actually textual emendations--an owner of the book has compared it to a manuscript (or his memory) and filled in missing words and made corrections. I’m a busy-body so I tell the women this. They seem impressed but move away quickly.

There are another few examples of expurgated books throughout the exhibit: expurgation was a form of censorship in late sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Italy in which a Church official crossed out passages in Hebrew texts that had been deemed offensive to Christianity. Each time I stopped at one, I heard someone remarking on this phenomenon.

Expurgation and blue paper seemed to draw a lot of interest from the crowd. Changes in the process for dying paper and the greater availability of indigo made it easier to start printing on blue paper in the sixteenth century. But it was still relatively rare and something of a luxury item at first. The Valmadonna Trust has an unusually large collection of editions printed on blue paper as well.

When one of the tour groups enters the incunabula room I move to the next room where several manuscripts are on display. Mr. Lunzer and the Valmadonna Trust set as their main goal the collecting of printed books but along the way, they acquired quite a manuscript collection, small but significant. It includes one of the earliest Pentateuchs copied in Europe in the 10th or 11th century. It also includes the only dated Hebrew manuscript still extant from medieval England, another Pentateuch, written in 1189, just about a century before the Jews were expelled from England in 1290.

I move into the fourth room, another large room. The designers of the exhibit have dubbed this the “Reading Room” and it consists of 8 long rows of display cases, displaying hundreds of books. Most are open to title pages, some to internal pages of interest. The riches in this room are also unbelievable.

I find some other old friends--I mean books, of course, like the Riva di Trento edition of Alfasi’s commentary/abridgement of the Talmud with the coat of arms of Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo on the title page. Cardinal Madruzzo was the prince-bishop of Trent and therefore the host of the Council of Trent, the Catholic church’s major program of response to the Reformation in the middle of the sixteenth century.

I also find an old friend (a person) who was on the same fellowship in Israel several year ago. He is there with his wife, one of his children, and his father-in-law, a prominent Israeli scholar. We catch up and then we go back to looking at the books. A few minutes later, I see him again and he tells me that he saw Dr. Ruth walk by in the other room.

Some other highlights in this room:
--a copy of Sefer Abudraham published in Fez in 1516, only the very first book ever printed on the African continent and possibly one of two copies extant in the world.
--a series of calendars, diplomas, and broadsides hanging on the wall, including wall calendars from Mantua, 1553, and Venice, 1612, listing Saints Days and other Christian holidays along with Jewish holidays.
--one of the broadsides is “Eleh Divre ha-Brit” from the Hague, 1798, declaring the rights of man after the Napoleonic invasion of the Low Countries.

Every so often I look out at the crowd: heavily Jewish, and heavily Orthodox--mainly modern Orthodox, some haredim, but all ages are there, men and women. I think of that phrase “the people of the book.”

This room also contains a number of books, newsletters, journals, and reports printed by the Jewish communities of India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It’s remarkable to see a book with text in Hebrew, English, and Marathi on the same page. I only know it’s Marathi because the label tells me so. I think of the movie that my wife and I saw just the night before, “Slumdog Millionaire,” and I have an irreverant vision of the crowd breaking into a Bollywood dance sequence.

I turn and see Jack Lunzer standing and talking, surrounded by dozens of people asking him questions, complimenting him on the collection. I think of going and introducing myself and thanking him again for the photocopies but every time I look over he is surrounded.

I leave this room and find the room with a video of Mr. Lunzer speaking about the collection. If I can’t speak to the man, I’ll listen to him on tape. This room is packed as well; when the video ends and loops around to the beginning, some seats open up. I take one and settle in to hear about the collection. After a few minutes, a diminutive woman with a familiar face walks by me, looking for a seat. It takes me a few minutes to recognize Dr. Ruth.

I’m starting to get tired but I make another pass through the collection to get to some of the corners that I missed when the crowd was at its peak. I decide to go down at 4:45 to avoid the crush at the coat check. As I leave Sothebys just a few minutes before 5, I hear a man behind me in the lobby trying to gather a mincha minyan (a quorum of ten men for the afternoon prayers). I look back and see more than 10 men. I can go meet my college friend and not feel guilty.

As I leave, I realize that indeed, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I enjoyed the books, and I took some notes on things I noticed to follow up on in my own research. I also was grateful to the designers of the exhibit for finding a way to not only see some books but to really see and feel the magnitude of the collection. I also enjoyed seeing--and being in--the crowd. At the beginning of Edward Rothstein’s article in the New York Times he asked whether bibliophilia could be a religious experience. I thought of this as I was leaving and hearing the mincha service starting behind me. And the thought occurred to me: this hadn’t just been a day trip to the big city, but a pilgrimage of sorts.

(The original title was "Diary of a Bibliomaniac" but I changed that after some reflection on the meaning of the terms "Bibliomaniac" and "Bibliophile.")
(I had originally called Bomberg a Calvinist but a sharp-eyed correspondent e-mailed to point out that there is no evidence that Daniel Bomberg was ever a Calvinist--and, of course, he certainly wasn't a Calvinist when he began his printing career in Venice.)

2009-02-12T13:50:00.002-05:00

There's an article in the Forward on the malaise in the movement of Conservative Judaism with this telling paragraph:

"Emblematic of the malaise is the rise of something known as transdenominational Judaism. It consists of Jewish religious and cultural activists, mostly under 35, who reject denominational labels, viewing their Judaism as transcending the separate streams. Its best-known expressions are so-called independent minyanim, informal prayer groups that meet in community centers, synagogue basements or even churches, refusing synagogue affiliation. There are said to be at least 80 such groups across the country, with thousands of members. Their primary leaders, most observers say, are young graduates of Conservative schools, summer camps and even seminaries who continue to practice Conservative Judaism but reject the name and the institutions."

Maybe changing the name from the "United Synagogue of America" to "United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism" in the early 1990s wasn't such a good idea after all.

Valmadonna Trust Library on exhibit

2009-02-12T10:01:00.001-05:00

Over on one of my official work blogs which is concerned professionally with "old books" I posted this notice about an incredible book exhibit now going on in New York.

Difdafti ha-yom

2009-02-09T21:12:00.003-05:00

In the column on the right, I put books I have read. By "read" I mean more or less read through the whole thing although my wife says I read so fast sometimes I'm really skimming.

I do a lot of skimming as well and I also read a lot of journal articles or parts of monographs in the course of doing research. I generally refrain from putting that reading in the right column on the blog.

But there is another kind of handling of books and journals that I do a lot. Israelis call it "le-dafdef"-- "to page through"-- it means something like skimming but more like scanning the chapter headings, the first paragraphs of sections, the table of contents, etc.--something like what your teacher in a high school "study skills" class might have told you about "previewing" a textbook chapter before reading it.

(I think the lack of capital letters makes Hebrew very hard to skim. I either le-dafdef a Hebrew text or I have to really read it.)

Not only do I sometimes go in search of material to le-dafdef on purpose ("keeping up with the literature") sometimes such material comes to me in the mail (journals) and sometimes by e-mail. And I can't walk by the new book shelf in my university library without stopping. Since I walk by it several times a week, I tend to le-dafdef a lot of new books, some in my field, some in related fields, and some in other people's fields. I couldn't possibly list all the works that I difdef, but I'm launching a new feature here to list some of the more interesting finds.

I tend to assume I have no readers so I'm mainly doing this for myself. Giving myself a Google-able way to remember where I've come across something.

So in Hillman Library today, difdafti:

Ronald Ehrenburg and Charlotte Kuh, eds. Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future (Oxford UP, 2009) which reports on the Mellon Graduate Education Initiative that was in place at a number of institutions including the Penn History department in the 1990s.... this was a nice piece of serendipity since the other day on the same shelf I came across the latest book on the philosophy of history by Murray Murphy, who taught for many years in that department. I've been reading his Truth and History (SUNY Press, 2009) on the bus.

Howard Schwartz's most recent collection of Jewish folktales is Leaves from the Garden of Eden (Oxford UP, 2009). He includes all the useful scholarly information, like notes on sources, commentary, and indexes at the back. Well, indexes are always at the back but would it be terrible to have the note on sources and the commentary included with each story?

Karen O'Reilly's Key Concepts in Ethnography only occupied me for only a few minutes because I'm not planning to do any ethnography any time soon (I would need a time machine). But a number of the grad students I work with do some ethnography.

Finally, I teach a little about ancient empires in my survey courses as part of the background of Jewish life in antiquity. So Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, eds. The Dynamics of Early Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2009) caught my eye.

Looking back on it, I guess a big order from Oxford UP was recently cataloged.

(And yes, I realize that saying "to le-dafdef" makes little sense grammatically but bear with me...)

Books I Read in 2008

2009-02-03T20:43:00.002-05:00

December, 2008:
Seymour Epstein, Leah
Israel M. Ta-Shma, Creativity and Tradition
E.M. Forster, Howard's End
Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man
Josephine Tey, A Shilling for Candles
November, 2008:
Arianna Franklin, Mistress of the Art of Death
October, 2008:
Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
Faye Kellerman, Milk and Honey
Faye Kellerman, Day of Atonement
September, 2008:
Faye Kellerman, Stone Kiss
Batya Gur, Bethlehem Road Murder
August 2008:
P.D. James, Devices and Desires
Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair
Faye Kellerman, Jupiter's Bones
Faye Kellerman, Sacred and Profane
Margery Allingham, The Case of the Late Pig
Faye Kellerman, The Ritual Bath
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Ayelet Waldman, Death Gets a Time-Out
Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book
July 2008:
Clive James, Cultural Amnesia
Lawrence Raphael, ed. Criminal Kabbalah
Lawrence Raphael, ed. Mystery Midrash
Max Apple, The Jew of Home Depot
A.A. Milne, The Red House Mystery
Chaim Potok, The Promise
Chaim Potok, The Chosen
Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy
Sue Erikson Bloland, In the Shadow of Fame
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Donna Leon, Through a Glass, Darkly
Edmund Crispin, Glimpses of the Moon
Laurence Roth, Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories
Amanda Cross, The Edge of Doom
Amanda Cross, Honest Doubt
June 2008:
n+1 collective, What We Should Have Known
Detection Club, Ask a Policeman
The New Yorker, January-June 2008
Edmund Crispin, Buried for Pleasure
Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding
Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster
Amanda Cross, The Theban Mysteries
Amanda Cross, No Word from Winifred
Amanda Cross, A Trap for Fools
Amanda Cross, An Imperfect Spy
Amanda Cross, The Puzzled Heart
Julius Lester, The Autobiography of God
May 2008:
Rachel Elior and Peter Schaefer, eds. Creation and Re-Creation in Jewish Thought
Nicholas Rescher, Interpreting Philosophy
Amanda Cross, Sweet Death, Kind Death
Amanda Cross, The Question of Max
Robert Kahn McGregor and Ethan Lewis, Conundrums for the Long Weekend
Edmund Crispin, Swan Song
Anthony Grafton, Codex in Crisis
Amanda Cross, In the Last Analysis
Amanda Cross, The James Joyce Murder
Amanda Cross, Poetic Justice
Amanda Cross, The Players Come Again
Donna Leon, Death and Judgement
April 2008:
Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country
Donna Leon, Death at La Fenice
Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy Sayers, Presumption of Death
Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop
Edmund Crispin, Holy Disorders
Giulio Lucarelli, Carte Blanche
March 2008:
Donna Leon, Dressed for Death
Dara Horn, In the Image
Giulio Leoni, The Mosaic Crimes
February 2008:
Lee Goldberg, Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants
Etienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe?
Moshe Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?
Maggie Anton, Rashi's Daughters, Book Two: Miriam
Aaron Hughes, The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy
Maggie Anton, Rashi's Daughters, Book One: Joheved
Dara Horn, The World to Come
George Steiner, My Unwritten Books
January 2008:
Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Studies
Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe

Books I Read in 2007

2009-02-03T20:41:00.001-05:00

December 2007:
Martin Aurand, The Spectator and the Topographical City
Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here
October 2007:
P.D. James, Death in Holy Orders
September 2007:
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, The Censor, The Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century
Zev Gries, The Book in the Jewish World, 1700-1900
C.P. Snow, The Affair
Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography
August 2007:
Robert Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction
Edward Crispin, Frequent Hearses
Diana Lobel, A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Bahya ibn Pakuda's Duties of the Heart
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Michael Stanislawski, A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
July 2007:
William Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Akzaban
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Judith Martin, No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice
Edward Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly
Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
John Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography
Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise
Abraham Socher, The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy
June 2007:
Dorothy Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel
Dorothy Sayers, Unnatural Death (The Dawson Pedigree)
Robertson Davies, A Mixture of Frailties
Robertson Davies, Leaven of Malice
Robertson Davies, Tempest Tost
Dorothy Sayers and Robert Eustace, The Documents in the Case
Barbara Pym, An Academic Question
E.C. Bentley, Trent's Last Case
Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation
Dorothy Sayers, Five Red Herrings
Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?
May 2007:
Sherwin Nuland, Maimonides
Dorothy Sayers and Jill Patton Walsh, Thrones, Dominations
Dorothy Sayers, Busmam's Honeymoon
Batya Gur, Murder Duet
Batya Gur, Murder in Jerusalem
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons
April 2007:
Cora Daniels, Ghettonation
David Lodge, Small World
Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison
Dorothy Sayers, Clouds of Witness
Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body?
Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
Edith Skom, The Charles Dickens Murders
March 2007:
David Lodge, Changing Places
Israel Zangwill, The Big Bow Mystery
Paul Bass and Douglas Rae, Murder in the Model City
Arthur Asa Berger, Durkheim is Dead
Carole Nelson Douglas, Castle Rouge
Michael Cook, The Koran: A Very Short Introduction
George Dove, The Reader and the Detective Story
Israel Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb
Caleb Carr, The Italian Secretary
February 2007:
Elizabeth Clark, History, Theory, Text
A.E. Murch, The Development of the Detective Novel
Julia Kristeva, Murder in Byzantium
Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self
Malcolm Turnball, Victims or Villains: Jewish Images in Classic English Detective Fiction
Laurie R. King, The Art of Detection
January 2007:
Abigail Browning, ed. Murder is No Mitzvah
Carole Nelson Douglas, Goodnight Mr. Holmes
Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance
Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms
Gluckel of Hameln, Memoirs
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
Laurie R. King, Night Work

Markers of the Decline of Civilization

2009-01-29T21:41:00.003-05:00

The Washington Post is shutting down Book World.

Brandeis University is shutting down its art museum.

"Star Class Photos" for elementary school class photos.

The superintendent of a large-city public school system thinks it appropriate to call a two-hour delay for the morning after the Super Bowl.

Through the pane

2009-01-26T20:45:00.002-05:00

I've always like the poem by "Ch.D." included at the beginning of Natalie Zemon Davis' Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford University Press, 1975). Here is the opening stanza:

"Born abroad, she longs for you, compagnons.
She longs to shake your hand, to share your wine.
She longs for home, four hundred years away.
Through the pane she hears you but is not heard.
She deserves your pity but will not have it. "

I immediately thought of this poem last weekend when I came across this passage in Jack Finney's time-travel novel, Time and Again (Simon & Schuster, 1970):

"There--well, there they were, the people of the stiff old woodcuts, only... these moved. The swaying coats and dresses there on the walks and crossing the street before and behind us were of new-dyed cloth--maroon, bottle-green, blue, strong brown, unfaded blacks--and I saw the shimmer of light and shadow in the appearing and disappearing long folds. And the leather and rubber they walked in pressed into and marked the slush of the street crossings; and their breaths puffed out into the winter air, momentarily visible. And through the trembling, rattling glass panes of the bus we heard their living voices, and heard a girl laugh aloud. Looking out at their winter-flushed faces, I felt like shouting for joy." (121)

Historians are not time-travellers, of course, and we are professionalized to poo-poo the "antiquarian." But the desire to hear the dead when they were living-- that desire is there, I think, for almost all of us in some form or another.

Eclecticism of the Year 2008

2009-01-13T12:24:00.002-05:00

For my first post after a long absence from blogging here, I would like to award the first annual Tea-Lemon-Old Books Award for Best Statement Regarding Old Books Revealing Eclectic Interests Published in Journalism or Scholarly Outlets for 2008. The winner is:

Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic, December 31, 2008, p.48 of the print edition:

"Among the delicacies in my library alongside Sefer Hasidim, Bologna, 1538, first edition, Salman Schocken's copy, and the Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, London 1920, first edition, foreword by Walter de la Mare, is Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-up Legend, by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson, Los Angeles, 1996, first edition, inscribed by its subject."

Mr. Wieseltier, stop by to claim your prize (a cup of hot tea with lemon) next time you are in Pittsburgh. (Just bring that copy of Sefer Hasidim with you...).

Small World

2008-03-30T10:53:00.002-05:00

Friday was a fun day. A friend from high school was in town to give a talk at Duquesne University and I met him for coffee in the morning. Later in the day, I helped lead a professional development workshop for our graduate students on the topic of book reviewing. In the course of that workshop, I explained to the graduate students the way in which my first published book review, written while still in graduate school, ended up being on a volume of essays on art and Jewish identity in contemporary America that was also the catalog from an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. Later still, I took the bus down to Duquesne to hear my friend's talk, which turned out to be about the forms and functions of literary book reviewing. It was a wonderful talk and he's an accomplished reviewer. (You can see his latest work here.) I got a ride home with my friend's host at Duquesne. While we were driving up Forbes Avenue, I remarked on the coincidence of the two events and mentioned my story of how I ended up as a reviewer of a book on art and identity--and learned that the driver of the car I was in was the daughter of one of the artists featured in that exhibit at the Jewish Museum those many years ago.

(By the way, the title of this post is part of the answer to a trivia challenge from a previous post.)

Paging the Public Editor

2008-03-29T12:14:00.004-05:00

I'm not doing a lot of politics on the blog these days--not doing much at all.
But I was in Oakland yesterday and saw the overflow crowd at the Obama rally outside the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial listening to Obama speech on loudspeakers. And I heard from a colleague who got in that the place was packed to the rafters. And I had already heard from someone else that all tickets to the event were gone within hours on Thursday.

So when I opened the New York Times this morning, I was pretty surprised to find a photo on the front page that featured one lonely "O'Bama" supporter across from a solid flank of Hillary supporters. Can't deviate from the reigning media narrative that, as the caption says, " While Hillary Clinton leads in the polls in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama has his supporters, too." Here's the photo and the story and here's the "Today's Paper" page online where you can see an image of the front page of the print edition (at least for a few more hours).

Now if I didn't know the Pittsburgh neighborhood where this photo was taken well and if I didn't happen to be there yesterday or see the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette--so I'm describing 90+% of the readership of the New York Times print edition--I surely would not have known that right behind the photographer were thousands of people gathered to hear Obama speak. Here's the Post-Gazette photo that does a better job capturing what was going on in Pittsburgh yesterday.

We hear a lot about the media treating Obama (and McCain) with kid gloves. But I think this picture in the Times is evidence of the more insidious problem with media coverage of our elections: it's not just that policy issues get pushed aside for "process" stories. Even in the "process" stories, once the press has settled on a narrative, a kind of groupthink seems to take over until some radical change occurs to shift the narrative. A primary can change the narrative--if Obama ends up winning Pennsylvania (even by 20 votes), watch for the stories about how Clinton wasn't as strong here as everyone thought. (If Clinton wins Pennsylvania [even by 20 votes], then the conventional wisdom will nod and point out how Obama can't seem to win the big states.)

If you don't think the groupthink is real and that it has worked on the readership of the major media outlets, take a look at the reader comments on the NYT politics blog about Casey's endorsement of Obama. I was astounded by how many commentators took Casey to task for going against "the will of the people" in Pennsylvania by supporting Obama rather than Clinton. A few of the commentators pointed out that PA has yet to hold its primary and that polling is not the same as voting. But they were like a chorus of the sane drowned out by those who have already put PA in the Clinton column. Now I realize that a lot of this complaint had to do with some convoluted argument that the Obama and Clinton camps are having over whether superdelegates should follow the electorate and which electorate they should follow and that some of the criticism aimed at Casey was really aimed at the Obama folks for supposed hypocrisies of this or that sort. But I just couldn't get over the simple fact that there seem to be a hefty group of people out there for whom Hillary Clinton has already won the PA primary.

Opening Day is coming

2008-03-23T11:34:00.002-05:00

and what better way to celebrate than with a 1981 letter by John Rawls, the great political theorist, recounting a conversation about baseball with another scholar. Here it is, published in the Boston Review.

A puzzle for you

2008-03-15T20:21:00.003-05:00

"Information is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people. Ergo, it's no longer necessary to hoard your information in one building, or keep your top scholars corralled in one campus. There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years, though very few people have woken up to the fact: [1] [2] and [3]."

Name the three inventions, the speaker, and the novel in which this appears. (You can use Google to get the answer, but only if you use Google or reference books in doing crossword puzzles; you have to wrestle with your own conscience here. At least try to guess the three inventions before you open the new tab.)

First Robo-Call of the season

2008-03-13T15:10:00.002-05:00

When: about 4 pm today
Who: Rendell
Supporting: Clinton
What: rally tomorrow in Pittsburgh

I'll keep a running tally in the sidebar until the PA primary.

Master of the Return

2008-03-13T08:32:00.003-05:00

I received an invitation to a brunch at a Pittsburgh Jewish community institution with this description:
"Alan Veingrad: Former Dallas Cowboy, played on the 1992 Super Bowl team speaks about his spiritual journey from being a Super Bowl star to an observant and Hasidic Jew."

And all I could think of was that of course a former member of the Cowboys would have a lot of teshuvah to do.

(Yes, I know he played on the offensive line and not special teams, but I love a good pun in a headline.)

The early tutor gets the afternoon ice cream?

2008-03-11T19:45:00.005-05:00

I'm sure any current reader of Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy's classic novel of academic politics (1951) can point to their favorite examples that demonstrate how very different academic life and campus culture are a half century later.

As my wife and I rush around, trying to balance work, day care, after-school schedules, large amounts of homework for our first grader, we are always feeling rushed in the evenings as we try to eat dinner early enough to get the kids to bed early enough for them to get a good night of sleep and for us to get done all our after-kids-go-to-bed chores.

So this passage just sounds like something from a lost world:

"And yet in the darkening afternoons when he chugged up to the Co-op with Mrs. Mulcahy and the children, leaving the motor running while he hurried them into the counter for an after-school treat, ice-cream cones and Nabs [query: what are these?] all around, he and his wife, their noses white-tipped from the cold, were always brisk and merry." (1952 edition, p.22)

Now I am well aware that Mrs. Mulcahy is a stay-at-home-Mom (or housewife in 1950's parlance) and I do not regret for one moment the advances of feminism in the last 50 years that mean that Mrs. Tea-Lemon-Old Books is Dr. Tea-Lemon-Old Books, MD who works outside the home. My wistfulness about this passage has nothing to do with Mrs. Mulcahy's availability to spend time with her children after school.

On the contrary, it's the time available to Mr. Mulcahy and the kids that make me think about how foreign this passage sounds. These kids don't sound over-programmed. One might think they're rushing because they have to get the kids off to dance lessons or soccer, but one doesn't have that sense. The hurrying seems rather to come from a desire to come in from the cold; the motor running is to keep the car from dying (in the passages leading up to this, we've heard a lot about the Mulcahys' money problems and their old, unreliable car).

Naturally, I focus on Mulcahy: the amazing thing is that Mr. Mulcahy (he's a PhD, but it's a liberal arts college in the '50s, so Mr. fits better) is done with his work such that he can be with his family in the "after-school" hours. One figures he's got to leave the campus by not much after 3 to be driving up to the Co-op with his family for an after-school treat (4ish?) Maybe he only manages this every once in a while ("treat"), but McCarthy's phrasing here ("always brisk and merry") suggests some frequency at least. No afternoon classes? Office hours? Lectures and seminars? Class preparation? Committee meetings?

One clue: earlier in the book, in reference to an unfortunate nick-name he has gotten from the students, we hear about "eight-o'clock tutorials" (p.7). Imagine that.

Stanley Fish Misinterpreted

2008-03-10T20:29:00.003-05:00

Stanley Fish has a post in his New York Times blog clarifying his intentions to his readers and complaining about being misinterpreted. One of the early commentators (no. 33) gets the irony. The comments went on and on and I couldn't read them all, but I didn't see the one I was expecting: "Ha! Ha! Signed, E.D. Hirsch."

The Chit-Chat Index and Subway Door Index

2008-03-10T12:12:00.007-05:00

I came across this interesting discussion on "City-Data-Forum" about Bostonians. The weight of opinion there seems to be that Bostonians tend to be more aloof than in other places, with some debate over whether aloof and rude go together. (I think not.)

I've blogged before once or twice about how I'm not a big Boston fan, but I do think over-generalization is problematic. Lots of Bostonians are friendly, lots are rude, lots are aloof, lots are cold, and lots overlaps one or more of these non-exclusive categories. And I doubt the proportions are that different from any other major city. Maybe a slightly higher "aloof" score.

But having lived in a number of cities (and spent time visiting the big "City"), I propose the following two indexes.

First, the "Chit Chat Index": How bizarre will a clerk in a chain store think you are if you make small talk about weather while buying an umbrella? And how much will the clerk engage in the small talk?

From lowest to highest, in my experience:

Boston: Clerk's facial expression seems similar to what it might be if you had just suggested that you move into his/her house. Clerk does not speak.
Washington: Clerk registers no facial expression but responds with a conventional pleasantry.
Philadelphia: Clerk chats amiably about rain.
Pittsburgh: Clerk tells you all about rainstorms experienced since 1997 and invites you over for dinner. (Ok that last one is an exaggeration.)

Second, the "Subway Door Index": How easily can you exit a subway car? Will passengers wishing to board the train step aside to let you off? (Here I exclude Pittsburgh--never having ridden the T here--and include New York as a major locus of subway riding.)

From easiest to exit to hardest to exit, in my experience:

Philadelphia: Not enough people trying to get on to make a difference.
Washington: The people will respectfully stand aside, lined up as a "V" on either side of the door. (I am told this is changing due to increasing ridership on the Metro and the increasing partisan rancor of the Bush years.)
New York: A lot of people on the platform, but a narrow path will open.
Boston, most stops: A solid wall of people--each giving a blank stare as you try to figure out between which two people you might escape.
Boston, Park Street, rush hour: A solid wall of people will begin pushing onto the train as soon as the door opens. This is really why Charlie couldn't get off the MTA.

God and Blair at Yale

2008-03-07T23:08:00.004-05:00

Sorry, couldn't resist, and I will be surprised if some headline writer doesn't come up with this.

See the article in the Guardian or the Independent.

A dashboard monitor for the car battery?

2008-02-24T20:10:00.003-05:00

Has this been invented? And if not, why not?

We have a second car that we drive rarely. When it's this cold, we really should start it more often and let it run. This week we were reminded of this again--the hard way. My wife needed to use this car on Tuesday. It started fine and she drove to our son's preschool--about a 10 minute drive. When she came back out, the car wouldn't start. The AAA guy told her/reminded her that starting the car takes the most charge off the battery, and he suggested starting the car every other day at least and letting it run 15 minutes at least each time.

So this morning while my wife and children were all out, I spent 20 minutes of quality time with the New York Times Book Review and the sounds of Sinatra on 1320 am and sat in the car with it running. But while I sat, I thought, and this is what I thought: the AAA guy has a tester that tests the charge. Why not have something like that always testing the charge with a wire running to a dashboard control that displays how much charge is left or how much time is needed to recharge the battery. That way, if you don't use the car much, you can check out the "battery monitor" when you do get the car started and if it looks low (maybe bars like on the cell phone?), you can bear this in mind if you're making a short trip and make sure to let the car sit and idle for a while. Seems like it would be a useful feature. So why isn't there something like this on car dashboards?

Unless--this is a scary thought--we are part of a very small minority that lives in a cold climate with a (second) car that is used rarely and only for short trips. So maybe there's no market?

Goodbye Cafe La Fortuna

2008-02-21T20:23:00.002-05:00

The New York Times is reporting that Cafe La Fortuna on the Upper West Side will close on Sunday. This became one of my favorite cafes when my sister lived a few blocks away for a couple of years in the mid 1990s. She then moved a few blocks even further but I still tried to get over to Cafe La Fortuna whenever I visited. I didn't really care about the Lennon/Ono mystique but I liked the coffee and the desserts and the relatively relaxed atmosphere.

(Mention of the Beatles in two consecutive posts is only a coincidence.)

Israel asks forgiveness from the Beatles

2008-01-29T09:14:00.000-05:00

The New York Times reports that the State of Israel has now officially made peace with the Beatles.

Again, a small news item sets off a chain of associations in my head leading to Ben Gurion and Spinoza. (On Ben Gurion's participation in the "nationalist rehabilitation of Spinoza," see Daniel Schwartz, "The Spinoza Image in Jewish Culture, 1656-1956," Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University, 2007).

(I would also guess that more people in Israel today listen to the Beatles than read Spinoza.)

We can call it "checked baggage"

2008-01-28T21:45:00.000-05:00

A few days ago on a flight from Pittsburgh to Charlotte, while watching dozens of people struggling aboard with suitcases and trying to fit them in overhead compartments, I had an idea: wouldn't it be great if the airlines could devise a system whereby people would arrive at the airport and give their suitcases to the airlines who could then deliver those suitcases to the passengers' final destinations?

Mr. Banks, call the office.

2008-01-28T21:35:00.000-05:00

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article on troubles at the Bank of England, including the first run on a bank in Britain in a century (which took place last fall). I cannot read a sentence with the words "Britain," "bank run," and "century" without getting Mary Poppins on the brain. What does this say about me?

Things to read this summer?

2008-01-22T15:46:00.000-05:00

Geraldine Brook's new novel, People of the Book, which sounds like a kind of novelized reception history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, reviewed last week in the New York Times Book Review and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Max Apple's The Jew of Home Depot, also reviewed this Sunday in the NYT, sounds intriguing. Although I don't usually read short stories, I very slightly know the author, so maybe.

The Newberry Medal winner, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, by Laura Ann Schlitz. (But why does Karen MacPherson describe it as "nonfiction" in her review distributed by Scripps Howard and published in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette?)

A post by my friend JSE at Quomodocumque reminds me of a great classic, The Pushcart War.

Some of the new books on Islam featured in the January 6 New York Times Book Review.

The collected works of David Macaulay, the subject of an appreciation by Peter Miller in the January 30 New Republic (a review of an exhibit at the National Building Museum in DC). And Peter Miller makes a good case that these are not children's books. Or that all books are children's books.

And Ruth Franklin in the same issue of The New Republic also gives me a good hint what not to bother with.

Interesting things people do with new technology and historical figures

2008-01-03T15:08:00.001-05:00

A group of people have entered Thomas Jefferson's library into "Library Thing." See here for details.

Chaucer has a blog.

I wonder who is on Facebook.

Interesting possibilities here for fun, creative pedagogy, and new kinds of historical research.

"Erev Iyyun" on Sepharad in Ashkenaz

2008-01-03T09:57:00.000-05:00

The "Erev Iyyun" [evening of discussion] is one of my favorite parts of Israeli academia (it may be limited to Jewish studies scholarship for all I know). Two or three scholars discuss a recent book--offering comment and criticism--and then the author responds. Almost always, these are for monographs. So I am a bit surprised that a multi-author volume, Sepharad in Ashkenaz: Medieval Knowledge and Eighteenth-Century Enlightened Jewish Discourse, ed. Resianne Fontaine, Andrea Schatz, and Irene Zwiep, will be the subject of such an evening this coming Monday (January 7) at 6 pm in Jerusalem. See here for details. I am also proud because I am the author of 1 of the 16 articles. I am also scared because I am the author of 1 of the 16 articles (the criticism is always polite but can be sharp). Looking at the program, however, it looks more like a mini-conference with three lectures on subjects related to the book, as opposed to three lectures offering a critique of the book (especially since one of the lectures is by one of the contributors to the book).

For more information on the book, see here.

And if anyone is in Jerusalem and goes to this, please send me an e-mail or comment here and let me know what was said.

Update: a minute after I posted this, I found this post at the Michtavim blog which mentions the book.

Pittsburgh: the world's biggest small town...

2008-01-02T22:16:00.000-05:00

... or smallest big city? (I'm pretty sure this was tourist slogan for Pittsburgh or somewhere else at some point.)

Either way, one of the things my wife and I love about living here is that Pittsburgh offers pretty much everything a large metropolitan area offers but with such a low housing cost and decent city public schools (at least in our neighborhood) that we can live in close proximity to the major cultural and entertainment venues.

A few years ago we visited Chicago and stayed with friends in Evanston. A trip to the science museum in Hyde Park was an all-day outing with a 45 minute drive in each direction.

A few weeks ago we spent a Sunday taking children to Hebrew school and swim class in our neighborhood, then went downtown to a children's theatre performance, and then went to Oakland to see the renovated dinosaur exhibit at the Carnegie Natural History Museum. We were tired out at the end, but none of the car trips took more than 15 minutes. This was a pretty busy Sunday for us and not typical but we had the tickets for the play and the tickets for the dinosaur preview were issued for a specific time. But a day like that just would not be possible in Chicago or New York.

Another friend, who lives in New York, just e-mailed about her family's visit to a college town in the upper south (trying to keep this anonymous) over the Christmas-New Year's week. She writes: "We had a nice time in ________- it's somewhat of a shock to the system to be in a small town where you can drive anywhere in 10-15 minutes!"

End of Semester Update

2007-12-23T16:59:00.000-05:00

Very little blogging for the last couple of months as I finished revisions to a book manuscript. Look for a weighty tome on the reception of Judah Halevi's Book of the Kuzari sometime next year.

I finished the revisions just before the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies but didn't have a chance to print and mail before heading to the conference. So I was in a bit of a quandary when people asked whether the book was done. Saying yes but it still needs to be mailed to the publisher didn't convince anyone, least of all my editor. So it was a relief to get back from Toronto and actually mail it off.

a URL in Yiddish?

2007-10-21T20:37:00.001-05:00

Catching up with a stack of Wall Street Journal's, I find an article from Thursday October 11: "What's the Hindi word for Dot-Com?" about a pilot program to create Internet addresses using non-Roman alphabets. The examples given in a box on the front page of the "Marketplace" section: Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese, Tamil. One of these is not like the others! Michael Chabon must be pleased.

And yes, I know that this is still available for sale.

More Irrationality from USAirways

2007-10-09T13:41:00.000-05:00

USAir just announced a drop in service levels at Pittsburgh International Airport which was once their largest hub. In contrast to the reactions to previous rounds of cut-backs, most Pittsburghers seem to be just shrugging their shoulders and moving on.

I do like that Southwest has come here and that I can fly to Chicago and Philadelphia for very little. I also like that other airlines have ratcheted up service a little.

But I also miss being able to fly direct almost everywhere in the US. It's becoming nearly impossible to fly direct from Pittsburgh to the West Coast. Toronto is also out which I think may be the end of the "International" in Pittsburgh International.

And I still don't understand USAir: I've already mentioned that 9 flights a day from Philadelphia to La Guardia seems absurd. Today I learned that one can fly on USAir from Pittsburgh to White Plains, NY through Charlotte or Philadelphia (although one might not be able to pay utility bills for a few months after paying the fare). Again, this means that USAir flies from Philadelphia to White Plains.... why?

I certainly understand why USAir concentrated on Philadelphia as an international hub. But why all these short routes to other spots in the megalopolis? Why does the federal government allow this when air traffic around New York and Philadelphia is out of control?

And who flies from Philadelphia to New York?

Advice on Escaping the Spanish Inquisition

2007-10-08T20:33:00.000-05:00

If you want to escape from the Spanish Inquisition (and you are a fifteenth-century Spanish Jew), here's my advice: don't convert to Christianity. See, this will actually put you under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.

But today's New York Times reports that apparently some people think that Columbus' "parents converted [from Judaism to Christianity] to escape the Spanish Inquisition." There were lots of reasons to convert to Christianity in fifteenth-century Spain and lots and lots of Jews did so. However, none of those reasons involved escaping the Inquisition.

Clearly nobody at the Times (or at the Post-Gazette which reprinted the article) was reading this blog back in May of 2005 where I thought I made this point pretty clear.
(Actually I'm pretty sure nobody at the Times or the Post-Gazette reads it now.)

(Would it be too pedantic to also point out that Columbus was born circa 1450 and the Inquisition was founded in Spain in the late 1470s? Yes, I thought so. )

Books I read in 2006

2007-09-08T20:48:00.001-05:00

removed from the sidebar because it is getting too long:

December 2006:
Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Tailors
Richard Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine
Laurie R. King, A Grave Talent
Laurie R. King, To Play the Fool
Laurie R. King, With Child
November 2006:
Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms
David Mamet, The Wicked Son
October 2006:
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism
Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Paul Griffiths, Religious Reading
September 2006:
Henry Adams, Mont St. Michel and Chartres
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, part 1
Leslie Fiedler, The Last Jew in America
August 2006:
Laurie R. King, The Game
The New Yorker, May-July 2006
Daniel Dennet, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Laurie R. King, Justice Hall
July 2006:
Brian Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy
George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture
Manfred Unger et al., Juden in Leipzig: Eine Dokumentation
Colm Toibin, The Master
James Ault, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church
Laurie R. King, The Moor
June 2006:
Susan Allen Toth, Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East
P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Laurie R. King, O Jerusalem
Zachary Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro
May 2006:
Laurie R. King, A Darker Place
Myla Goldberg, Bee Season
Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites
Laurie R. King, A Monstrous Regiment of Women
Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland
April 2006:
H. Goldberg, ed. The Life of Judaism
Carl Knappett, Thinking Through Material Culture
The New Yorker, September 2005-April 2006
March 2006:
I. Hodder, ed. The Meanings of Things
S. Lubar and W. D. Kingery, eds. History from Things
February 2006:
Haym Soloveitchik, Yaynam [Jewish Trade in Gentile Wine in the Middle Ages
Marvin Lowenthal, The Jews of Germany: A Story of Sixteen Centuries
January 2006:
Laurie R. King, A Letter of Mary
Susan Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

Books I read in 2005

2007-09-08T20:46:00.000-05:00

removed from the sidebar because the page is getting too long:

December 2005:
Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
Michael Sells, Approaching the Quran
Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
William Bayer, Pattern Crimes
November 2005:
Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli
M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, trans. The Qur'an
Batya Gur, The Saturday Morning Murder: A Psychoanalytic Case
Gigi Anders, Jubana: The Awkwardly True and Dazzling Adventures of a Jewish Cubana Goddess
October 2005:
Linda Woodhead, An Introduction to Christianity
Leon Batista Alberti, The Use and Abuse of Books
September 2005:
Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, trans. The Meaning of the Glorious Koran
John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path
Michael Kurland, ed. My Sherlock Holmes: Untold Stories of the Great Detective
Willard Oxtoby, ed. World Religions: Western Traditions
August 2005:
Batya Gur, Murder on a Kibbutz: A Communal Case
Lev Grossman, Codex
Abraham Melamed, On the Shoulders of Giants: The Debate between Moderns and Ancients in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Thought
David Liss, A Spectacle of Corruption
T.M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry
Jane Smiley, Moo
E.B. White, Stuart Little
The New Yorker, December 2004-August 2006
July 2005:
Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815
Aaron Hughes, The Texture of the Divine
David Myers, Resisting History
Robert Eisen, The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy
Batya Gur, Literary Murder: A Critical Case
Michael Chabon, The Final Solution
June 2005:
C. Helmer and C. Landmesser, eds. One Scripture or Many? Canon from Biblical, Theological, and Philosophical Perspectives
Gershon Hundert, The Jews of Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century
James Hynes, The Lecturer's Tale
May 2005:
Peter Ochs and Nancy Levene, eds. Textual Reasonings: Jewish Philosophy and Text Study at the End of the Twentieth Century
David Katz, God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism
Robert Chazan, Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes. Selected Stories
E. Benbassa and J-C. Attias, The Jews and the Other
Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences
April 2005:
Jon Stewart, America
Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia
Joseph Rykwert, The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City
March 2005:
Judith Frishman et al., Religious Identity and the Problem of Historical Foundation
Reinhart Kosseleck, The Practice of Conceptual History
Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture
Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry
Herbert Davidson, Moses Maimonides
Yvonne Petry, Gender, Kabbalah, and the Reformation
Jane Leavy, Sandy Kaufax: A Lefty's Legacy
February 2005:
Roni Weinstein, Marriage Rituals Italian Style
Christopher Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance
Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets
Ivan Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle

When is Art Finished? A not so deep question

2007-09-06T10:37:00.000-05:00

I passed a bank branch in my neighborhood this morning. The side wall was painted with what could only be described as a kind of abstract expressionist mural. When I went inside to tell the tellers that I thought it was really interesting, they told me it's not finished and that the finished mural will be a kind of tableau of different houses and buildings in the neighborhood.

So is an unfinished mural art if people see and respond to it as art? If it were a text, I can imagine the debate between Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, and E.D. Hirsch, but I don't know enough about art criticism to imagine who the relevant art critics would be.

Unions and Cities

2007-09-05T22:00:00.000-05:00

This is really interesting. Quick: before you follow that link, which metro area has a lower rate of unionization in the work force: Pittsburgh or Las Vegas?

You're wrong (unless you guessed where I was going with this and switched to the other answer).

Cities Big and Small

2007-09-05T21:11:00.000-05:00

I tend to be interested in things Springfield (Mass), because my in-laws live there, and also in things New Haven, because I went to college there. So I found this article by Mark Oppenheimer, "Medium Town: On Living in A City Smaller than New York" interesting. (I got to it via this post at the Pittsburgh blog, Antirust.)

Oppenheimer basically argues that there are pleasures in living in small cities--like New Haven or Springfield--rather than in New York or other very large cities. Oppenheim writes well even if his arguments are not startlingly original: the quality of life is better; the cost of living is lower; people are more normal and life is more well-balanced, etc. In the second part of the essay, he turns to an argument that not all writers need to live in New York in order to be successful. I suppose this is necessary because he is writing in the New Haven Review of Books (a new journal that he founded; I guess the New Haven Register Literary Supplement just didn't sound right).

Anyway, the thought struck me that the piece is particularly New England-centric. Although he does mention Des Moines, his frame of reference is clearly the industrial (or post-industrial rather) New England small city or big town: New Haven, Springfield, Worcester, Hartford, Providence, etc. Although there are other sorts of places where one can have a nice quality of life outside of the really big metropolitan areas (college towns, medium-sized metro areas--e.g. Pittsburgh) and although there are some metro areas/small cities in other parts of the country that have similar demographics to a New Haven or a Springfield, those cities offer a particular advantage. Due to the short distances in New England from one metro area to the next (indeed, is there any part of southern New England not included in an MSA or a CMSA?), these cities are not free-standing entities in the middle of nowhere. Rather, they are part of a kind megalopolis that stretches from Boston to New York and have close connections--in both a figurative (cultural and economic) and a literal (train lines, highways) to both. So it's a little disengenous to pose New Haven as an alternative to New York when in many ways it functions as a kind of urban exurb in the mega New York.

But the evocations of his neighborhoods, past and present--Forest Park in Springfield and Westville in New Haven--are worth the price of admission.

It's also interesting how one's perspective changes:

When I lived in Philadelphia (the 6th largest metro area in the United States), I got tired of explaining to friends in New York (the largest metro area) that Philadelphia was, in fact, a pretty big city with a lot of culture and big-city amenities (restaurants, public transit, etc.) But I would get irritated with Philadelphia's provincialism and wonder why the residents of the nation's 6th largest metro area weren't more assertive about their big-city-ness.

Now that I live in Pittsburgh (the 22nd largest metro area), I am more willing to accept my status as a provincial, but I still tend to boast to non-Pittsburgh about all the wonderful aspects of Pittsburgh.

But I can now recognize that my civic boosting is actually a form of provincialism. And I can now see that my boasting/pushing Philadelphia was also a form of provincialism. (So in a sense Oppenheimer's piece can be read as a kind of praise for civic modesty--taking pride in one's town or city but with a proper perspective on it.)

In between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, I lived in Boston. Boston is my own counter-example that nonetheless somehow proves the rule. I never liked Boston as much as Bostonians thought I should like it. And when I lived in Boston, I was constantly annoyed by the "Hub of the Universe" and "Athens of America" mentality. Didn't Bostonians realize that Boston is only the 7th largest metro area? (Then I read E. Digby Baltzell's Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia and it all made sense.)

So the constant collective need to see Boston as part of a holy triumvirate of the East Coast (money in NY, politics in DC, and culture and science in Boston) is perhaps the greatest provincialism of all.

More song lyric confusion...

2007-09-04T20:42:00.000-05:00

For the last few weeks, our kids have been requesting that we sing "Country Roads" at bedtime.

(The other favorites right now are "Sweet Baby James" and "I'll Walk in the Rain By Your Side." This is the fault of a certain aunt with whom we visited in June and July and the people behind the Rise Up Singing songbook. That's right Pete Seeger: you and your buddies have made our bedtime a rather drawn out affair.)

The first stanza of "Country Roads" drives me crazy, because I can't figure out what the subject of "blowing like a breeze" is:

This site has this for the lyrics of the first stanza:

"Almost heaven, west virginia
Blue ridge mountains, shenandoah river
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze."

I have trouble imagining how mountains can blow like a breeze. But this is how I have always heard it in my head:

"Almost heaven, West Virginia: Blue Ridge mountains, Shenandoah River.
Life is old there, older than the trees; younger than the mountains, blowing in the breeze."

I can almost get my head around mountains blowing in the breeze. Really the trees on top of the mountains would be swaying a bit in the breeze which might give the impression of the mountains moving a bit in the breeze.

So perhaps my mishearing the lyrics was my way of correcting the imagery for myself.

Trees can blow in a breeze (but can they blow like a breeze?) more easily (or more litarally I should say) than mountains. However, I don't see how the last phrase can really modify the trees unless you allow for shifting the phrases to fit the rhyme scheme. I guess this would have sounded awkward:

"Life is old there, older than the trees blowing in the breeze, but younger than the mountains which give off the effect of blowing in the breeze because of the trees on them"

My wife insists that proper parsing is:

"Life is old there. [Life is] older than the trees. [Life is] younger than the mountains. [Life is] blowing like a breeze.

This interpretation has some merit (although I was dubious about it when she first proposed it) especially if we consider an important folk music intertext : if the answer can be blowing in wind, I suppose life can blow like a (or in the) breeze.

(Don't get me started on how little sense "Sweet Baby James" makes. But there is nothing cuter than my three-year-old belting out "There is a young cowboy..." at the top of his lungs.)

How to Drink Coffee in Pittsburgh

2007-08-30T13:15:00.000-05:00

(The title is borrowed from a friend who once taught the world “How to eat dinner in Princeton.” The coffee situation in Pittsburgh is much better than the dinner situation in Princeton. Read on.)

I recently discovered this website, run by Ariel Rubenstein of Tel Aviv University, which lists good cafes in university neighborhoods around the world. I then contributed 2 places in Pittsburgh. Following his guidelines, I only sent in places in Oakland, adjacent to Pitt and CMU.

So here is my more detailed list of places that I drink coffee (or tea) in Pittsburgh. It’s idiosyncratic, but I try to explain what I like about each place below:

in Oakland (home to Pitt and CMU):

Kiva Han at Forbes and Craig:
This website says the coffee is bad, but I disagree. It’s not the best in the world, but it’s fine. And the snacks and lunches are good. Except on the very hottest days, it’s a nice place to sit and work. They have some tables outside also, but most summer mornings one of them is occupied by a man smoking a rather awful smelling cigar. Kiva Han has another location down Forbes Ave (in the direction of downtown). I don’t like it as much as the Craig Street location.... it’s usually too hot inside and the tables and chairs aren’t as comfortable.

Crazy Mocha, 207 Oakland Ave:
This is around the corner from the Panera on Forbes. Central location on the Pitt campus. The coffee here is a little better than Kiva Han; the food selection is not as broad. Not many tables here so not a great place to work, but it’s a nice place to meet someone for coffee. And there is almost always a New York Times on the newspaper rack.

[Update 8/31/07: For the first time, I was here in the late afternoon--very hot from the exposure to the sun. So pay attention to the timing if you want to sit here in the afternoon.]

Crazy Mocha in the Carnegie Library:
Another outlet of this local chain. The tables here are nice and it’s fun being inside the library but more limited hours (only open when the library is). Same food and drink selection as the other branch. (There are also branches downtown, in Shadyside, and Bloomfield.)

Here’s another reason I often go to Crazy Mocha: For $30, I got a Donor Plus Carnegie Library card which gives me a 20% discount at all Crazy Mocha locations (not only the one in the library). If you drink coffee a lot, you will make back the $30 quickly and the library gets a donation. This is almost too good of a deal and I am probably ruining it by sharing the news.

You can also find Starbucks and Caribou Coffee in Oakland if you really want. Inside Hillman Library is Cup and Chaucer which is a pleasant place to sit. Like most Pitt campus dining outlets, it serves Starbucks coffee.

If you want to sit outside in Schenley Plaza, you can get coffee at the Bagel Factory kiosk. However, you will most likely wait in a long line and your small coffee will come in a cup bigger than your head. (Ask for ½ decaf unless you have high caffeine tolerance.)

I don’t pay attention to WI-FI at coffee places in Oakland because I have an office there with an internet connection or I use WI-FI in the library. But I think Schenley Plaza has WI-FI also.

in Squirrel Hill, from the top of the hill down:

Coffee Tree Roasters, 5840 Forbes Ave
This is right in the middle of the fancier shopping street and was the favorite of the late Mayor Bob O’Connor if that matters to you. Good coffee plus a free refill on the brewed stuff plus free WI-FI for 2 hours makes this a good place to plant oneself for a while. Limited food choices—mainly sweets. Always a NYT and almost always a Wall Street Journal, plus the local papers, lying around. My only complaints are that there are almost always smokers at the 2 outside tables, one of which is right next to the door and that the place is sometimes over airconditioned.

61C, 1839 Murray Ave (at Bartlett)
Decent coffee (although Coffee Tree is better) and pastries. Lots of tables. This is the place that mid-morning will have almost every table taken up by someone with a laptop. Also the place for Squirrel Hill power coffees. A nice outdoor space around the corner (i.e. off the main street), but again smokers flock to it and you have to go out the main door and walk around to get to it. A bit loud when someone orders a smoothie. They also have a lot of teas but if you are a serious tea-drinker you will keep walking a block to the next place on my list.

Te Cafe, 2000 Murray Ave (at Beacon)
Go here to drink tea. They also serve coffee and take great pride in the fancy glass brewing thing they have but it tastes no better than anywhere else and they charge more. This is a tea place and there’s a very good selection. Also some nice sandwiches. WI-FI and usually a NYT lying around. Not that many tables but enough.

Aroma/Rolladin, 2120 Murray Ave. (below Hobart)
This used to be my favorite place in Squirrel Hill: a great Israeli bakery, a very generous “double” espresso, and a nice atmosphere. The burekas are still good but they have cut way back on the other baked goods (now they are bringing in a lot of packaged stuff from NY) and the challah was kind of strange last time we got it. But you can still get a decent cup of coffee and there are plenty of tables and the staff is friendly. The name changes back and forth but I think they may now be sticking with Aroma.

Tango Coffee, 5806 Forward Ave.
Best Argentinean coffeehouse in Pittsburgh. Not a place to linger for hours but a good place for a cortado and a pastry after a movie. They did just add WI-FI so maybe it will be more of a place to work now.

elsewhere:

I’ve blogged about my visit to Mt. Lebanon and to Aldo Coffee here. And as my update indicates, I am told that Uptown Coffee is better.

If you are in the Strip District and just want coffee, you go to La Prima. If you want to sit somewhere and work for a few hours, leave the Strip District. Downtown is not a great coffee area: the Crazy Mocha in the Allegheny Building is a welcome addition and apparently they have added one in the Gateway complex—this covers the two ends of downtown, I suppose. The Symphony store, Curtain Call, also has a coffee bar. I’m sure there are other places also but I don’t know about them. There is a Crazy Mocha in Shadyside on Ellsworth Ave. In the heart of Walnut Street, there is a place called Jitters. I haven’t been there in five years but I used to stop every morning when I lived in Shadyside for a year.

If you want to tell me about other places, leave a comment.

Upcoming Events in Pittsburgh Jewish community

2007-08-16T12:38:00.000-05:00

Two things on the horizon look interesting. I learned about both in the Jewish Chronicle:

Sunday, August 26, the Jewish Cemetery and Burial Association will have a public ceremony for burial of worn-out texts with the name of God in Hebrew and other ritual objects. 11 am at Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery. The Association holds an annual burial but this year, for the first time, they have decided to hold a communal event. This was reported in last week's issue of the Chronicle. Good luck finding an on-line version.

Sunday November 4, 1 pm: Rodef Shalom will hold a symposium on the history of the congregation as part of its celebration of its 150th anniversary. Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis is scheduled as the keynote speaker. This was reported in today's issue. Rodef Shalom is one of the oldest and most significant congregations in the American Reform movement and was the host for the rabbinical convention that ratified that "Pittsburgh Platform" in 1885, the defining documents of Reform Judaism for about 50 years.

Things I Don't Understand, Cont.

2007-08-13T10:00:00.000-05:00

I learn from today's Wall Street Journal that:

"US Airways flies nine trips a day from La Guardia to also-congested Philadelphia International Airport."

In what universe does this make sense?

Two Ironies in Hispanic-less Pittsburgh

2007-08-09T16:49:00.000-05:00

Pittsburgh is not without Hispanics, of course, but it does have one of the smallest percentage of Hispanics of any major US metro area and, as Pittsblog and Nullspace have just reminded us, it is one of the few major TV markets without a Univision station.

Two things strike me as ironic given this situation.

1) The Steelers are among the two or three most popular NFL teams among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. (See here for a discussion.)

2) The University of Pittsburgh is a major center for Latin American studies, through its Center for Latin American Studies, its Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, and Hillman Library's Lozano collection. Pitt also hosts the Latin American Studies Association and one of the major scholarly journals in Latin American history, the Hispanic American Historical Review, moved to Pitt last month.

Literary Critics on the Move

2007-08-09T11:33:00.001-05:00

According to this New York Times article, James Wood, a long-time literary critic at The New Republic, will now be playing staff writer for The New Yorker. (Although since this comes in August, I guess he won't be eligible for the playoffs.)

It's really only of passing interest to me since I read both magazines, but I can't think of the last time I laughed out loud while reading an article in the NYT Arts section:

"Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at The New Republic, said, 'The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself.'"