The New Yorker: The Jewish Issue

I find The New Yorker extremely variable: some weeks I read nothing but the cartoons, other weeks I read nearly everything. The January 12 issue is a nearly everything issue.

Not all the articles are about Jews and Judaism, but it seems like a large number of the ones I read were. Let me tally the Jews and Judaism articles I read:

• David Remnick's comment on Obama and Israel:

  And, what is more, history has proved that the seemingly impossible can be achieved: the Irish and the English have all but resolved a conflict that began in the days of Oliver Cromwell, and on January 20th an African-American President will cross the color line and move into the White House - a house that slaves helped build.

• Jeffrey Toobin's profile of Barney Frank, which I found fascinating. This seems strange to me because I don't find either politics or the current financial crisis particularly interesting, and both feature strongly in this article. My favorite bit about politics:

  Before the meeting, the Democrats at the White House, including Frank, Pelosi, and Barack Obama, had caucused privately in the Roosevelt Room about their strategy for the day. "Barack said, 'I think we need to go ahead with this,'" Frank recalled. "He was being conciliatory, because he thinks it's very important for us, both in public policy and politically, that we don't get blamed for fucking up the economy. And that we not fuck up the economy."

  It also takes on gay rights, and as much as I'm uninvolved and relatively uninformed, I find messages of hope for the future so uplifting:

  Still, Frank is uncharacteristically hopeful about the future, including gay rights. "We're going to do three things in Congress," he told me. "First, a hate-crimes bill - that shouldn't be too hard. Next, employment discrimination. We almost got that through before, but now we can win even if we add transgender protections, which we are going to do. And finally, after the troops get home from Iraq, gays in the military. The time has come."

• Adam Kirsch's critic at large piece about Hannah Arendt. I don't actually know anything about Hannah Arendt and I'm completely disinterested in philosophy, but I love The New Yorker's pieces on the lives of philosophers.

  The fact that Heidegger and Arendt were lovers was no secret to her close friends - "Oh, how very exciting!" Karl Jaspers exclaimed when Arendt told him - and it has been public knowledge since Elisabeth Young-Bruehl revealed it in her 1982 biography. But the affair became a kind of highbrow scandal in 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger, a professor at M.I.T., wrote about it in a short book, "Hannah Arendt / Martin Heidegger." Ettinger, who had been granted access to the Heidegger-Arendt correspondence for the purpose of writing a new biography of Arendt, instead made it the subject of a sensational exposé.

• David Denby's movie reviews, which included a look at Defiance:

  Daniel Craig, it turns out, can embody a Moses figure without losing his sex appeal, which may be the highest compliment I've ever paid an actor.

I also read a few other interesting pieces:

• Ben McGrath's Talk of the Town piece about Caroline Kennedy, which points out that people had nearly the same things to say about how Hilary spoke, and which offers possible ways to address her image issues:

  Perhaps Mary Mayotte could help? Mayotte runs the Speech Fitness Institute and has experience in curbing the tics of fashion-industry types. ("I've seen people say 'fabulous' twenty-five times in a three-minute interview," she said.)

• Lizzie Widdicombe's Talk of the Town about the rich selling off their jewelry, which fits right in with the recent Gawker mocking of the rich-based coverage of the economic times:

  Sherman helps them prioritize: "I always say, 'Well, now, have you worn any of it? Or is there anything you're still emotionally tied to?'" She does a bit of therapy: "Most of them never thought about having to come up with money to pay regular expenses. I look upon it positively and say, 'Be glad you had these things, and be glad you had great taste, so now you can sell it in order to continue.'"

• Justin Vogt's Talk of the Town piece about official historians, which is could hilariously be about academia or fandom or any other semi-insulated community with an overbearing dean or BNF type:

  The allegations shocked the chairman of the advisory committee, Wm. Roger Louis, of the University of Texas at Austin. "Even by Texas standards, it was a level of vulgarity and crudeness that we found hard to believe," Louis said. Most troubling to Louis was Susser's apparent intolerance of any dissent. "We began to discover that it is the equivalent of a petty dictatorship in the Historian's Office," he said.

  Peter Hessler's article about a road trip in China (abstract only available online), which was good, but not as good as some of his previous slices of life in China:

  Periodically, he came through Beijing and slept on my couch for a week. The term of Peace Corps service is lifetime when it comes to guests. Sometimes I had three or four ex-volunteers staying in my apartment, all of them big Midwesterners drinking Yanjing beer and laughing about old times.

• Sasha Frere-Jones' review of Bon Iver, which I'm now going to have to listen to:

  The stack of voices is overwhelming - a combination of the secular and the religious in one cloudy mass - and is as exalted as any sound in American popular music today.