Subscribe:
RSS feed
Bits and Pieces of My Work and Interests
Browsing All Posts filed under »Personal«
Was This Saul Bellow’s First Published Piece?
In my early age I wanted to be a street car conductor. Later I wanted to be a mountaineer. At the present I have better and higher ambitions, like being a professional man.
A Jewish-Russian Frontier Man
June 1, 2015
This is the story of Aharon Ya'akov Dukhan, a Jewish-Russian frontier man whose life spanned the second half of the nineteenth century. In Pale in Comparison, a paper that I am currently developing, I argue that even in as late a period as the one in which Aharon Ya'akov was active, Jews were, in a certain economic sense, countryside people. The rural frontier was an integral part of the ecology that defined the economic and demographic aspects of Jewish lives in the Pale of Settlement. Dukhan embodied the experience of the Jewish frontier, and his path exemplifies several of the empirical regularities that I find in the paper.
“Stop Your Cruel Oppression of the Jews”: Reading a Cartoon
January 20, 2014
When I present my work on the Jewish migration, I like using this cartoon in order to illustrate the traditional thesis that the Jewish migration from the Pale of Settlement was caused by the pogroms. It shows a Jewish town, on that right, that was hit by a pogrom, and a stream of Jewish refugees fleeing it on their way to become immigrants in the United States. The cartoon is interesting in its own right, and I wanted to share my thoughts on how I understand it.
Dudu Geva: A Childhood Hero and a Prophet
September 11, 2012
Great art remains relevant for years. Real masterpieces can gain relevance over time. But these two pieces by my childhood comic books writer idol, Dudu Geva z”l, that I clipped from Kol-Ha’Ir (Jerusalem’s local newspaper) as a child some 24 years ago, are nothing short of divine inspiration and prophecy.
A wild Encounter with a Zoroastrian Taxi Driver
August 25, 2012
Every time I do something good, something bad happens. I can’t be happy. I’m afraid to be happy because I know that something bad will happen. I’m not superstitious, but lately these things happen. I took in some guy, he was drunk, suddenly he started speaking crazy shit, then he banged the window. It broke, […]
Yannay Spitzer 
June 9, 2015
0