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.
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Lernen

Orthodox Jewish thinkers on authentic religious belief in the modern world

1 februari 2024 Jonathan Gill 0

In recent years the Jewish background of the French essayist Michel de Montaigne has attracted increasing attention, and rightly so. His motto, “que sais-je?” or “what do I know?”  perhaps better translated as “what do I really know?” or even better yet “how do I know?”  ‘How do I know’ goes to the heart of the way Jews have wrestled with their identities, morally and politically, not to mention religiously, long before Ja’akov went mano … [Lees verder]

illustratie door Primo Gill
Opinie

“There where I live, there is my homeland”

12 juli 2023 Jonathan Gill 1

What is more Jewish than the figure of the Jewish heretic? Are we not named after someone who wrestled with the divine? Then why do we vilify and not celebrate those who doubt, resist, defy, and question?  Perhaps because Jewish heretics tend to come in two deliciously forbidden flavors, the charlatan (Sabbati Tzvi) and the saint (Spinoza), and the authorities would have us believe that they are the same, or at least equally suspect.  Both … [Lees verder]

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Kunst en Cultuur

‘A Tested Man’: Franz Kafka, Inside Out

7 maart 2023 Jonathan Gill 1

“Why don’t I stay within myself?” Franz Kafka wrote in his diary in May of 1910 in a fit of self-recrimination after committing “impertinences” toward a train conductor and one of his employers. He was referring to his inability to conceal his irritation and anger at a world that seemed designed to torture him. The question also applies to his writing, and if there’s an answer, it’s to be found at last, unabridged and unexpurgated, … [Lees verder]

TEKENINGEN Franz Kafka man met baard cover
Kunst en Cultuur

Kafka as Visual Artist, a dialectical gesture that was just getting started

14 februari 2023 Jonathan Gill 0

What do we want from poor Franz Kafka? Everything, it seems, even though or perhaps because  Kafka wanted nothing or even less than nothing from us. One of the most satisfying myths of our time is that Kafka was cripplingly ambivalent about publishing his works. In fact, he published three collections of stories and a variety of other works during his lifetime.  So though we ought not classify him with Emily Dickinson, who had no … [Lees verder]