Berichten door Jonathan Gill

Over Jonathan Gill

Jonathan Gill received his PhD from Columbia University in American literature and has taught literature, history, and writing at Columbia University, Barnard College, the Manhattan School of Music, Fordham University, the City College of New York, and Amsterdam University College. He specialises in post-World War II art, film and literature, African-American history and culture, experimental and vernacular musics, the counterculture of the 1960s, the literature of immigration and the cultures of intolerance. He has also taught Yiddish at the University of Amsterdam, and has written and lectured widely on Judaism and Jewish culture. His book "Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History, From Dutch Village to Capital of Black America" (Grove/Atlantic 2011), has been a New York Times best-seller. In 2020 he published "Hollywood Double Agent" (Abrams, hardcover 9781419740091) on espionage in Hollywood during the Cold War.

Rational Haggadah happens to be an ultra-right politicization of Pesach

6 april 2022 Jonathan Gill 1

Dennis Prager’s The Rational Passover Haggadah poses the liberal media are a greater threat to Western democracies than Russia There are those who object to the politicization of Passover. In particular gestures made by many Jewish communities – certainly most non-Orthodox families and kehillot – towards justice issues traditionally associated with progressive politics, more specifically the marginalization of the disempowered and the disenfranchised. But like it or not, adjusting the text of the seder to … [Lees verder]

Orthodox Heresies: Ruth Wisse’s Unsentimental Education

6 januari 2022 Jonathan Gill 1

review Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation by Ruth Wisse It’s so much easier when one’s adversaries are not only wrong, but stupid, and best of all, bad. The legendary Yiddishist Ruth Wisse’s most recent book, Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, offers us no such comfort. Yiddish like a religion Born Ruth Roskies in 1936 in Czernowitz, Romania (currently Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Wisse fled with her parents … [Lees verder]

Schrijver in de traditie van Umberto Eco en Henry James

25 november 2021 Jonathan Gill 1

Een vraag aan een bepaald soort Amsterdammer: wat doet Emile Schrijver in zijn vrije tijd? Het antwoord moet ‘niets’ zijn, omdat de directeur van het Joods Cultureel Kwartier, het hoofd van Het Joods Historisch Museum, de redacteur van de Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Culture, en hoogleraar geschiedenis van het Joodse boek aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam onmogelijk ‘vrije’ tijd kan hebben. De waarheid blijkt anders te zijn. Iemand die zo veel onderweg is als Schrijver, als een … [Lees verder]