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Total number of comments: 8 (since 2011-12-01 16:13:36)

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  • Exchange on anti-Sephardi racism on the left
    • rhipidon January 5, 2013 at 11:15 am

      Thank you for publishing this exchange. As a writer, I know very well the temptation to respond to a harsh review of my work-- especially a review that I feel has misread or overgeneralized me. I appreciate Rabbi Rosen's clarifications.

      However, I'm a little uneasy at just how far Rabbi Rosen takes his critique of David Shasha's review. Rabbi Rosen's defensiveness takes away from the power of his critique -- and it doesn't seem to come from the same "assumption of good faith on the part of his progressive allies" that he asks of Shasha. Two instances stick out and make me deeply uncomfortable:

      1. Twice, Rabbi Rosen bends over backwards to say that he wouldn't want to accuse Shasha of racism -- but then he goes on to back-handedly accuse Shasha of racism (in the "Having said all this" paragraph and the "Rather than criticize further" paragraph). Something smells funny in the kitchen here -- a whiff of the disingenuous that affects how I read the rest of Rabbi Rosen's otherwise important response.

      2. My jaw dropped when Rabbi Rosen ended the piece quoting "an old joke [he] hadn’t thought of in years" -- a joke whose humor utterly depends on the listener seeing women's bodies as objects of exchange value. I get the joke, of course, and I'm not asking for so-called politically correct censorship. We need to laugh more than we do. But I am asking Rabbi Rosen why he thinks it's appropriate in this instance to counter Shasha's claims with a joke that deflects the issue of racism with the issue of sexism?

      I'm a long admirer of Rabbi Rosen's work and his politics. I also know that the best response to a bad review is sometimes to say nothing or to wait awhile before responding.

  • Trapped
    • rhipidon August 5, 2012 at 10:28 pm

      Thanks for this honest, thorough, and rattling account. (If I wasn't rattled, then it means I wasn't listening.)

  • Read 25 entries in 'New Yorker' fiction parody contest
    • rhipidon July 12, 2012 at 1:49 pm with 1 replies

      This is such a great contest -- exposing the literary and political hypocrisy of the New Yorker -- and I loved so many of these entries.

      For me, the winner, hands down, is Liz Shulman's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Birthright."

      Her story reads as a well-crafted piece of writing in itself (it's the one piece I felt compelled to re-read several times, and this says a lot about how much I enjoyed it). I also love how it manages to parody the default style of the typical New Yorker fiction pieces while also parodying Shani Boianjiu's "Means of Supressing Demonstrations" and Nathan Englander's New Yorker story from a few months ago, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Ann Frank" (with its own nod to Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"). And her story ends with a wink to Rose Surnow's "I gave a handjob at Jew Camp" (link to mondoweiss.net).

      She does all this . . . in just four paragraphs . . . no easy task to compress like this and still write a compelling story.

  • Reminder: 'New Yorker' fiction parody contest ends in 3 days!
    • rhipidon July 10, 2012 at 9:01 am

      Loved this contest -- a brilliant response to the New Yorker. When will you be posting the results? Can't wait to see who won!

  • Etgar Keret in the 'NY Times Magazine' tries on orientalism with an iconic 'Arab' look
    • rhipidon February 27, 2012 at 6:18 pm

      kamanja, Keret wrote exactly the essay he wanted -- and I doubt that this reviewer would disagree. I do think, however, her review gives us a more complete reading of Keret by emphasizing how political his fun story about mustaches really is. I agree with you that we have an obligation to allow authors "to tell a story in the kind of language the kind of characters they have invented would use." I think we also have an obligation to read between the lines of what authors are saying -- and at times this requires us to read against the grain of what they're saying. As an author myself, I can't imagine wanting anything less from my readers.

    • rhipidon February 27, 2012 at 6:12 pm

      Thanks for a great article. Keret's essay was outrageous, and I was glad to see a response like this.

  • 'A matter of justice': Joe Sacco on the Suez war, Gaza, and his future work
    • rhipidon December 22, 2011 at 11:50 am with 1 replies

      "Well, you know, having studied journalism, anyone who goes into the journalism profession, I would hope, is interested in the world around them, and I was particularly interested in what was going on in Palestine because growing up, I had considered Palestinians terrorists. Without really paying attention to what was going on in the Middle East, that’s what I was getting from, basically, osmosis. That’s what was filtering down to me without doing any of my own research into it. And slowly my impression began to change when I did begin to pay attention, which was around the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s."

      Thanks for a great interview! Joe Sacco is one of the few journalists we still have in the U.S. (And the fact that he doesn't write for a newspaper or work on cable news says a lot about the state of contemporary U.S. journalism.)

  • The earlier me

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