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Letter from the West Bank
A bar mitzvah outing—at a West Bank shooting range. Photograph by Scott Pargett. It’s not easy to get directions over the phone from someone who works at a shooting range. I was pretty sure Eran had...
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Smokable Songbooks, Controversial Vodka
Lindsay Gibbs’s Titanic: The Tennis Story recounts how tennis players and Titanic passengers Dick Williams and Karl Behr met on a rescue ship and went on to become Davis Cup partners—as historical...
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Something Out of Something: Talking with Etgar Keret
In 2006, the great book-blurber and novelist Gary Shteyngart called Etgar Keret’s The Nimrod Flipout “the best work of literature to come out of Israel in the last five thousand years—better than...
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Etgar Keret, Tel Aviv, Israel
A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. The nicest place I ever got to write in was in MacDowell. My studio there was surrounded by a beautiful snowy forest, and looking...
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Letter from Tel Aviv: Love and Rockets
It’s prime rocket-time in Tel Aviv and I have to pee. This is a totally legitimate concern, but one which I am still not able to bring up to my Israeli friends: bathroom timing. The last place you...
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The Born Identity: An Interview with Sayed Kashua
My Skype chat with Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua started off on a promising note when we bonded over our ineptitude for all things mathematical. Except he, in typical fashion, was being facetious,...
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War Memorial
They commute with guns. A lot of Israeli soldiers live at home while they do their mandatory service, and, like me, they take the bus to work every day. I’m a student so for me that means carrying...
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Cutouts
A few weeks ago I travelled to Israel to give some talks. Along with invitations to universities I had been contacted by the United States Embassy in Jerusalem and asked if I would participate in an...
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Waiting for the Siren
A letter from Jerusalem. Photo: Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, via Flickr The rockets are back. It wasn’t two years ago they were falling over Israel. Things progress, they regress, they explode, and then you...
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On the Slaughter
A political poem’s ironic new life. Bialik at around age thirty. ON THE SLAUGHTER Heaven—have mercy.If you hold a God(to whom there’s a paththat I haven’t found), pray for me.My heart has died. There...
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The In-Between Space: An Interview with Shelly Oria
Photo: T. Kira Madden The eighteen stories in New York 1 Tel Aviv 0, Shelly Oria’s debut collection, are beguiling, bizarre, and wise. (One of them, “My Wife, in Converse,” appeared in The Paris Review...
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On the Slaughter
We’re out until January 5, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year! * A political poem’s ironic new life. Bialik at...
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The Immutable Laws of Starfuckery
In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about her relatively marginal encounters with celebrities. Painting by Lucien Rudaux, ca. 1920–30. In Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s oral history of punk,...
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The Immutable Laws of Starfuckery
We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! Painting by Lucien Rudaux, ca. 1920–30. In Brushes with Greatness, Naomi Fry writes about her...
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The Hollywood Darling Who Tanked His Career to Combat Anti-Semitism
Ben Hecht One December day in 1939, Frank Nugent, a film critic for the New York Times, took his seat at the premiere of Gone with the Wind and waited for the carnage to unfold. So long and overblown...
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Eternal Friendship: An Unlikely Cold War Connection
Excerpt from Anouck Durand: Eternal Friendship (Siglio Press, 2017). All rights reserved. French artist-writer Anouk Durand’s photo-novel, Eternal Friendship, is collaged from photographic archives,...
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Aharon Appelfeld: You Cannot Be a Writer of Death
Aharon Appelfeld. You know, God is everywhere. He is in the human heart. He is in the plants. He is in the animals. Everywhere. You have to be very careful when you speak to human beings because the...
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Writing Fiction in the Shadow of Jerusalem
I started writing fiction while a cloud of death and mourning hung heavy over Jerusalem. To be clear: death and mourning are always hovering in the air over Jerusalem. It is not a joyful city. But...
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Imagining a Free Palestine
An ekphrasis on a fragmented nationalism. Installation view, Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot, 2006, stainless steel and neon glass tube. Photo: KhaoulaSharjah [CC BY-SA 4.0...
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On the Slaughter
A political poem’s ironic new life. Bialik at around age thirty. ON THE SLAUGHTER Heaven—have mercy.If you hold a God(to whom there’s a paththat I haven’t found), pray for me.My heart has died. There...
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