Tea, Lemon, Old Books

What's not digitized in Proquest (might be an ongoing series)

2023-07-26T09:52:00.000-05:00

I learned yesterday that letters to the editor to the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent in 1996 (and perhaps other years) are not digitized in ProQuest and nowhere in the metadata (as far as I can see) is this noted. How do I know? well, I was trying to remember a letter to the editor that I published pointing out that saying the Israeli electorate was not split on Netanyahu (in the 1996 election) because he had a 10-point margin among Jews undermined the claim of Israel as a democracy. I remembered a response saying "Shear is hung up on democracy" (or the like). So I went searching for this in proquest.... nada. I found my clippings of the letters (mine and the response) in a file folder after some searching through old files boxes. Here is my letter:

And the response. Apparently I am “hung up on the word ‘democracy.’”

But forget my political hangups. What I really came for was to point out this lack of digitization of letters to the editor & the implications for historical research. This seems deeply problematic given that there is no way to "turn every page" here as Robert Caro suggests.

Blogpost elsewhere

2020-04-24T16:51:00.001-05:00

this blog is more or less defunct so I can't imagine anybody is paying a lot of attention here. But just in case, you can find a blogpost from me on the Footprints blog today.

I have a piece on the first Duke of Sussex, Prince Augustus, and his books at the Footprints blog.

Roundup-- fun books end of 2017

2018-01-01T19:51:00.001-05:00

Matthew Carr, The Devils of Cardona-- not bad historical murder mystery

Robin Paige, Death at Glamis Castle
Robin Paige, Death at Darmoor
Robin Paige, Death in Hyde Park -- I like this series--quick reads; fun

Chanan Tigay, The Lost Book of Moses -- been meaning to read this since I found out about the Sutro collection-- worth the read

Niall Kishtainy, A Little History of Economics -- meh

Annie Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel -- super meh

Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders -- book within the book is better than the book

Rex Stout, Murder by the Book -- ok for the beach

Joseph Heller, Picture This -- kept waiting for the plot to appear

September-October 2017 fun reading

2017-11-03T09:12:00.004-05:00

Calvin Trillin, Quite Enough of This.
Robyn Paige, Death at Blenheim Palace
Robyn Paige, Death at Bishop's Keep
Jacqueline Winspear, A Dangerous Place
Jacqueline Winspear, An Incomplete Revenge
Lots of quasi-work; quasi-fun reading--mainly recent monographs on Israeli and Palestinian history and some memoirs of Palestinians and Israelis.

Some other blogging by me today

2017-11-03T09:10:00.001-05:00

I don't blog here much anymore. But if you are looking at this AND you happen to be interested in the history of Hebrew books, take a look at this blogpost: https://edblogs.columbia.edu/footprints/2017/11/03/announcing-the-year-of-incunabula-at-footprints/

Last bit of fun reading for August, 2017

2017-08-27T20:02:00.002-05:00

Veronica Stallwood, Oxford Mourning
Veronica Stallwood, Oxford Exit
Jacqueline Winspear, Birds of a Feather
Jacqueline Winspear, In this Grave Hour

Reading, more or less, August 2016-July 2017, non-mystery division

2017-08-16T14:35:00.001-05:00

Lisa Leff, The Archive Thief.
Roni Miron, מלאך ההיסטוריה
Andrew Sean Greer, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells
Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris
Najla Said, Looking for Palestine
Margaret Drabble, The Pure Gold Baby
Laney Salisbury, Provenance
James Kwak, Economism
Jonathan wilson, A Palestine Affair
Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence
Jean d'Ormesson, The Glory of the Empire
Joe Queenan, One for the Books
Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words
Adam Gidwitz, The Inquisitor's Tale
Ruth von Bernuth, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm
Niall Kishtainy, A Little History of Economics
Saul Friedlander, When Memory COmes
Kingsley Amis, The Green Man
Stewart O'Nan, City of Secrets
Jack Weatherford, Genghis Kahn and the Quest for God
Ari Shavit, My Promised Land
Gershom Gotenberg, The Unmaking of Israel
James Glecik, The Information
Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils
Christopher Buckley, The Relic Master
Kingsley Amis, The Alteration
Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace
Joan DeJean, How Paris became Paris
Connie Willis, Fire Watch
Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson
Connie Willis, The Doomsday Book
Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog
Connie Willis, All Clear
Connie Willis, Blackout
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

Reading January-July 2016, more or less

2017-08-16T14:29:00.002-05:00

uly 2016
Gish Amit, Ex-Libris
Maoz Kahana, From the Noda BeYehuda to the Chatam Sofer
Mitchell Duneir, Ghetto
Nicola Upson, London Rain
Michael Innes, Picture of Guilt
Michael Innes, Appleby's Answer
June 2016
Michael Innes, A Night of Errors
Michael Innes, The Ampersand Papers
Lawrence J. Epstein, The Dream of Zion: The Story of the First Zionist Congress
E.G. Rodford, The Bursar's Wife
Nicola Upson, The Death of Lucy Kyte
Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948
May 2016
James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse, Mycroft Holmes
James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil
James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night
Gavin Scott, The Age of Treachery
April 2016
Jeffrey T. Shnapp and Matthew Battles, The Library Beyond the Book
Herbert Tarr, So Help Me God
Herbert Tarr, Heaven Help Us
Herbert Tarr, The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen
James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Shadows of Death
March 2016
P.J. Brackston, Gretel and the Case of the Missing Frog Prints
J. Kenneth Galbraith, A Tenured Professor
Moulie Vidas, Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud
Adam S. Ferziger, Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism
February 2016
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe
Massimo Montanari, Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table
Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report
Daniel Boyarin: A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora
Benjamin Schreier, The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History
Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man
Martin Goodman et al, Toleration Within Judaism
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Jacque Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods
Ram Ben-Shalom, Medieval Jews and the Christian Past
Owen Fitzstephen, Hammett Unwritten
Marc B. Shapiro, Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites its History
Barry Forshaw, ed. Detective
John Walton, The Legendary Detective: The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction
James Lovegrove, The Thinking Engine
Kerry Greenwood, Raisins and Almonds
January 2016
Isadore Haiblum, Murder in Gotham
Henning Mankell, An Event in Autumn
Deborah Levy-Bertherat, The Travels of Daniel Ascher
Naomi Ragen, Devil in Jerusalem
Michael B. Oren, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide
Deborah Harkness, The Book of Life
Deborah Harkness, Shadow of Night
Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches
Charles Finch, The Last Enchantments
Sasha Abramsky, The House of 20,000 Books
Sigal Samuel, The Mystics of Mile End
Sarah Caudwell, The Sybll in Her Grave
Sarah Caudwell, The Sirens Sing of Murder
Sarah Caudwell, The Shortest Way to Hades
Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

Reading, mysteries, more or less-August 2016-July 2017

2017-08-16T14:28:00.002-05:00

Veronica Stallwood, Death and the Oxford Box
Jacqueline WInspear, Leaving Everything Most Loved
Jacqueline Winspear, Journey to Munich
Jacqueline Winspear, Messenger of Truth
T. Frank Muir, Eye for an Eye,
T. Frank Muir, Life for a Life,
T. Frank Muir, Tooth for a Tooth
T. Frank Muir, Hand for a Hand
Kerry Greenwood, Death at Victoria Dock
Kerry Greenwood, Death before Wicket
Kerry Greenwood, Murder and Mednelssohn
Susan Elia McNeal, The Queen's Accomplice
Jacqueline Winspear, Among the Mad
Jackqueline Winspear, Elegy for Eddie
Jacqueline Winspear, A Lesson in Secrets
Jacqueline Winspear, The Mapping of Love and Death
Jacqueline Winspear, Pardonable Lies
Ellis Peters, Monk's Hood
Jocelyn Davey (Chaim Raphael), Murder in Paradise
Jocelyn Davey (Chaim Raphael), The Naked Villainy
Jocelyn Davey (Chaim Raphael), A Treasury Alarm
Jocelyn Davey (Chaim Raphael), A Capital Offense
Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate
Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club
Henning Mankell, One Step Behind
Sue Grafton, ed. Writing Mysteries
Henning Mankell, Firewall
Laurie R. Kind, The Marriage of Mary Russell
Roger Herst, Rabbi Gabrielle Commits a Felony
Roger Herst, Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest
Susan Elia Macneal, The Queen's Accomplice
Roger Herst, Rabbi Gabrielle's Defiance
Roger Herst, A Kiss for Rabbi Gabrielle
Roger Herst, Rabbi Gabrielle's Scandal
Susan Elia MacNeal, Mrs. Roosevelt's Confidente
Susan Elia MacNeal, The Prime Minister's Secretary
Jed Rubenfeld, The Death Instinct
Susan Elia Macneal, His Magesty's Hope
Susan Elia MacNeal, Princess Elizabeth's Spy
Benjamin Black, Even the Dead
Frank Tallis, Death and the Maiden
Frank Tallis, Vienna Twilight
Susan Elia Macneal, Mr. Churchill's Secretary
Con Lehane, Murder at the 42nd Street Library
Nicola Upson, Angel with Two Faces
Nicola Upson, Two for Sorrow
Henning Mankell, Sidetracked
Frank Tallis, Fatal Lies
Andrea Camelleri, The Shape of Water

People and things that annoy me (in no particular order)

2016-02-22T20:21:00.002-05:00

Let me stress again the "no particular order" part. And I am well aware that many of these are first-world problems and annoyances of a privileged person. But I am in a bad mood and feel like venting. And what else is the Internet for? Okay, here goes:

1) People who do not wait to make left turns in the middle of the intersection but hang back making it impossible for anybody to go around them. But the people who go through yellow lights when there is opposite traffic waiting to make left turns are just as bad, maybe worse.

2) People who are planning not to vote if Bernie Sanders doesn't get the Democratic nomination. Hillary Clinton may not be your dream candidate folks, but anyone she appoints to the Supreme Court is going to be better than anyone the Republican candidate(s) would appoint. And there are many other examples where her being President would be a better outcome for America and the world than any of the Republicans.

3) Ralph Nader. For all the good he has done, I still can't forgive him for spreading the idea among some progressives that there isn't much difference between the two major parties in the US. See above. (Also does he know he borrowed the "not a dime's worth of difference" meme from George Wallace?)

4) Pedestrians who wave drivers who are stopping for them to go through the intersection.

5) Students who sit in a dark room until the instructor comes in.

6) People who use Saline Street as a short cut to Brown's Hill Road. This is very specific to my neighborhood in Pittsburgh. But you know who you are. You are not objectively stupid or immoral like the people in #2. but you do annoy me.

7) The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for three reasons: a) The new "insider guide" is stupid fluff. If you think this is going to save the print newspaper, think again. b) The editorial obsession with the state-owned liquuor stores. c) Putting the comics and the crossword puzzle in different places: they shuld always go in the Magazine. This started when David Shribman became editor. He came from the Boston Globe. And I hated this in the Boston Globe when I lived in Boston. Draw your own conclusions.

8) Islamophobic Jews. Islamophobia in general is bad, of course, but I am particularly annoyed by my fellow Jews who have fallen prey to ignorant nonsense. Call me a tribalist.

9) People who approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a zero-sum game. Is it so hard to try to understand context and feel empathy and concern for Israelis and Palestinians?

10) Cotton candy and petting zoos. No reason. Totally irrational. They are linked in that my kids like both of them and know that I hate both of them. Note: I don't find the people who like these annoying (well, not most of the time).

11) Giant Eagle: why are some of the products my family likes in the Greenfield store and not the Squirrel Hill store AND other products my family likes in Squirrel Hill but not Greenfield?

12) Republicans who talk about how lots of Democrats voted against the Civil Rights Act and lots of Republicans supported it. This is annoying and pernicious. It is only relevant today in that it shows how much the parties have changed in the last 50 years. There used to be liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. The former species is nearly extinct and the latter has become very rare. (Just realized that in a way George Wallace was not so far off in 1968 when there were liberal and conservative branches of both parties and Nixon and Humphrey would both be considered centrists these days. But Nader was very wrong in 2000.)

13) Myself, I guess. What kind of person is annoyed by Ralph Nader and not George Wallace?

(some of) What I read in 2012

2016-01-26T17:52:00.001-05:00

September 2012
Joseph Gaer and Ben Siegel, The Puritan Heritage: America's Roots in the Bible
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America
August 2012
Ayelet Waldman, The Big Nap
Barbara E. Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies
Jay Michaelson, Everything is God: The Path of NonDual Judaism
Amanda Cross, No Word from Winifred
Francesca Trivellato, The Kindness of Strangers
CP Snow, Last Things
CP Snow, The Sleep of Reason
Yoel Finkelman, Strictly Kosher Reading
Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades
Ann Blair, Too Much To Know
Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many
July 2012
Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind
June 2012
Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetary
Barbara Burstin, Steel City Jews
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It
May 2012
Lisa Jardine, The Awful End of Prince William the Silent
Sara Paretsky, Bitter Medicine
Will Eisner, Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood
Will Eisner, Fagin the Jew
Sara Paretsky, Breakdown
Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism
April 2012
Zachary Schiffman, The Birth of the Past
Sara Paretsky, Body Work
Jean Smith, A Masculine Ending
March 2012
Hazard Adams, Academic Tribes
Nicola Upson, An Expert in Murder
Edward Goldberg, Jews and Magic in Medici Florence
P.D. James, Death Comes ot Pemberly
January 2012
Sharon Kahn, Fax Me a Bagel
David Weiss Halivni, The Book and the Sword
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
Jane Langton, Steeplechase
Donna Leon, Drawing Conclusions

Charles Haar and Me

2012-04-23T22:51:00.000-05:00

Leafing through the Harvard magazine that came in the mail today, I learned that Charles Monroe Haar, "LLB 48, Brandeis professor of law emeritus" at the Harvard Law School, died on January 10. The Harvard obituary doesn't say how old he was, but google leads me to the New York Times obituary which reports that he was born in 1920. I never knew him and know very little about him except that he was one of the first experts in land use law and an important figure in urban redevelopment circles in the post-WW2 era. But when I saw his name and the report of his death, I felt a bit of emotion that can only be described as mourning combined with nostalgia. How and why does one mourn for a man one doesn't know? In fact,the mourning was only partially for Prof. Haar (although I wish his family my sincere condolences), but mostly for my own father, who died over two decades ago. Haar began teaching at Harvard Law school in 1952 (I learn from the obituary). In 1952, my father was a statistician for the Baltimore Redevelopment Land Agency and a night law student at the University of Maryland. At that time, Maryland offered no courses in land-use law. Indeed, according to Harvard magazine, "[Haar] was one of the first law professors to introduce students to the emerging field of land-use law." Since my father had gone to law school at the suggestion of his boss at the RLA and since he had decided that urban planning and land-use law were where he wanted to make his career, it was only natural perhaps that when he graduated from Maryland in 1953, he would turn to Harvard and Haar for some additional instruction. He got some sort of post-graduate fellowship and spent a happy year in Cambridge, MA in 1953-54. The most important aspect of the year was the opportunity to study with Haar at the law school and to participate in a research group on land use at the school of public administration. (You can find what looks like a rather dry report from 1955 entitled Farm and Other Operating-Unit Land-Use Planning at Google Books based on the work of this group.) From my father's point of view, the second most important aspect was that he took a labor law course (somehow he had not taken a labor law course in law school--lawyers, is this possible?) with Archibald Cox, later of Watergate fame, who told my father that he should switch from land-use to labor law (at least according to my father). My father stuck with land-use and left Cambridge to move to Saint Louis and then to DC. He was a practicing lawyer, mostly in government service, but he also taught off and on as an adjunct in law school (Catholic U in the 70s) and in urban planning (Maryland in the late 80s). Of course he used Haar's casebook for his courses. As I said, I never met Haar, and I don't even know how much my father kept in touch with him over the years. But that year seems to have been a formative experience. I didn't connect the dots when I was younger, but the newness of the field in the 1950s must have been exciting. Haar was less than a decade older than my father and was only in his second or third year of teaching in 1953-54. Haar was also Jewish (or at least born to Jewish parents, as the Boston Globe obituary puts it.) And in 1953, being Jewish meant something socially in the Ivy League, even, I'm guessing, in the law school. It is easy to see why my father might have felt such a strong connection to his teacher. I know my father really enjoyed that year. Once when we were visiting Boston in the late 70s or early 80s, my father dragged us to see the dorm he had lived in (looked like a total dump to me although the cinder blocks were probably new and gleaming in 1953) and later, when we did a college tour in the late 80s, we had to eat lunch at the Greenhouse Coffee Shop--I drew the line at the Wursthaus which was his first choice. The high point of the trip for him was sitting down at a table and finding an elderly man at the next table: "Professor [Paul] Freund? I am sure you don't remember me but you were the chair of the special student committee in 1953 when I applied to the program...." Professor Freund graciously said he remembered. Who knows? But it made my father very happy. My father died less than a year after that college trip. Professor Freund died a few years later (1992--I just checked on Wikipedia), and now Charles Haar is also gone. So is the Greenhouse Coffee shop and the Wursthaus too for that matter. And the nostalgia? I too spent a year as a kind of special student (hence the alumni magazine) at Harvard when I was writing my dissertation and my wife's work brought us to Boston. At some point during that year, it occurred to me that I was in a very vague way following in my father's footsteps. It even occurred to me at one point to look up Charles Haar and see what he could tell me about my father in that period. But I was busy with other things and didn't pursue this. (Now my nostalgia and mourning is mixed with regret.) I suppose it's strange to feel nostalgia for someone else's past. But Charles Haar and Paul Freund and Archibald Cox and Cambridge, Mass in 1953 all became part of my past as well. I'll leave it there.

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.