The Columbia Current

Deconstructing Mordecai Kaplan’s Civilization: Off the Shelf [Reviews]

By Stephanie Goldstein \\ Judaism as a Civilization Mordecai Kaplan 1934 \\ When I was in the third grade, I went to the South Bend Morris Theater to see my piano teacher play Golda in Fiddler on the Roof. I was delighted by the cast’s robust rendition of “Tradition,” a song about the importance of keeping traditions in a Jewish life. But I can still recall my mother’s down-turned expression as the women sang about matchmaking and its sometimes imperfect results. Marriage arrangement, a...

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Losing the War [Reviews]

By Lily Wilf \\ The Gatekeepers Dror Moreh Cinephile and Sony Pictures Classic, 2012 \\ Israeli national security is, understandably, a top-secret affair. The Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of U.S. Homeland Security, is one of the country’s three intelligence agencies responsible for all counterterrorism intelligence and operations involving prisoner interrogations and targeted killings. Nicknamed “the Shabak,” the Shin Bet operates outside the military and answers exclusively and directly...

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What We Do [From the Editors]

Admittedly vague, The Current’s subtitle offers an interpretation of our publication’s purpose: a journal of contemporary politics, culture, and Jewish affairs. What constitutes these different items is a question I am often asked by prospective writers. I usually struggle to find an answer. Charged words like “culture” always seem somehow dishonest to me. After all, is culture not redefined inductively on a constant basis? During my tenure with The Current, I have learned to suspend...

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America’s Got Emma, Trudy, and Elaine [Boroughing]

By David Fine \\ America’s Got Talent is a reality performance show set in the incongruous halls of Newark’s Performing Arts Center. The PAC, as everyone calls it, bears witness to spectacles of American “talent” of such a strange, wide variety during the show’s run that if aliens caught an episode light-years away they might assume we were declaring war on them – or offering to surrender, depending on which segment they picked up. The PAC’s wood-paneled, acoustically optimized performance...

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The Hester Club [Boroughing]

By Dara Marans \\ The Victorian homes daintily lined the streets. This was a pleasant excursion into Brooklyn on a weekend evening that provided an alternative to the subculture of techno music. Instead of a warehouse-style nightclub, a house was its replacement—painted pretty purple and green, with a bright front porch and white columns. The Hester Club, where strangers wine & dine in a private Jewish home. The hostess pulled out a large roll of blue tickets with perforated edges, sending...

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Raw and Unedited [Far Flung]

By Andrea García-Vargas \\ The protestors started at Al-Husseini mosque, after the Friday noon prayer. They waited for dozens of praying men to finish their salah and stand up from their ragged mats. Then, they set out. They came in keffiyehs, hijabs, jeans. They stood on the roof of vans wearing Che Guevara shirts, chanting through megaphones. They were men, they were women. They were children carrying slogans. I was not a protestor. I carried no slogans on a banner or A4 sheet of paper. I wore...

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Georgi [Far Flung]

By Eric Shapiro \\ When you spend too much time in a city, especially a foreign city, you grow mysteriously desensitized to life as it progresses around you. The majesty of the metropolis–any metropolis–is eaten away steadily, slyly, by the humdrum cadence of daily living. Suddenly what were once thrilling views and sounds become an inert backdrop to commonality. With each cobblestone tread under foot, hoards bumping apologetically all around, you’re thrust coolly into your pod of...

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Behind the Lion Curtain: McCarthyism at Columbia in the 1950s [Essay]

By Gilana Keller \\ Academic censorship has become a buzzword on campus of late. The recent and short-lived Barnard policy requiring flyers to contain administrative approval caused an uproar amongst governing boards on campus. The Student Governing Board claimed, “that it unnecessarily imposes a burden on student speech on campus.” Although the administration responded swiftly, the event raises the question once again of free speech on campus. Sixty years ago a case far more dramatic and with...

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An Unlikely Marriage: Jewish Argentinean Women and Leftist Politics in Buenos Aires [Essay]

By Maddie Wolberg \\ Days after November 1, 2011, Fidel Castro sent a letter offering his condolences to the Partido Comunista de Argentina (Communist Party of Argentina), mourning the death of its once-leader, Fanny Edelman. When the PC published its monthly newsletter on November 11, the issue included remarks of lament from sources as diverse as the Argentinean Secretariat of Human Rights and the African People’s Solidarity Committee. The entirety of the eight-page circular was devoted to Edelman’s...

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A Tale of Two Cities: Telegraph Avenue [Reviews]

By Divya Subramanian \\ Telegraph Avenue Michael Chabon Harper/HarperCollins Publishers \\ Tempeh looms large in Telegraph Avenue, the latest American epic from Michael Chabon, mostly as cultural shorthand for a certain type of white, sandal-wearing, beard-sporting Berkeley resident. In mapping the cultural terrain of Berkeley circa 2004, Chabon draws an incisive portrait of lives lived amid the detritus of the 70s. Here cult martial arts movies and vintage records exert a strange and otherworldly...

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Hebrew Treasures of Different Kinds: The People in the Books and Crossing Borders [Reviews]

By Joshua Fattal \\ The People in the Books: Hebraica and Judaica Manuscripts from Columbia University Libraries, and Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting Place of Cultures \\ The audience for exhibits of Jewish manuscripts is certainly a niche one; a single exhibit per season of these historical works would generally suffice. But this fall, two such exhibits opened up in New York City, one at Columbia University’s libraries and the other at the Jewish Museum. The Columbia exhibition,...

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