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Separation Anxiety

David Hollinger: God and Politics, 24 January 2008

The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West 
by Mark Lilla.
Knopf, 334 pp., $26, September 2007, 978 1 4000 4367 5
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... had produced German society, and even some German Jewish thinkers (for example, Hermann Cohen) joined in the theological celebration of it. Liberal theology thus became an authentic ‘political theology’, at the service of the state. In 1914, even Ernst Troeltsch, who more than any other theologian in this tradition worried that Christianity’s ...

On Not Being Sylvia Plath

Colm Tóibín: Thom Gunn on the Move, 13 September 2018

Selected Poems 
by Thom Gunn.
Faber, 336 pp., £16.99, July 2017, 978 0 571 32769 0
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... rolled, like stones, and he died’) I thought sadder than anything in Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen. I was also interested in Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Another September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was evoked in the poem. What was most interesting about ...

The Excommunicant

Richard Popkin: Spinoza v. the Synagogue, 15 October 1998

The God of Spinoza: A Philosophical Study 
by Richard Mason.
Cambridge, 272 pp., £35, May 1997, 0 521 58162 1
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Spinoza, Liberalism and the Question of Jewish Identity 
by Steven Smith.
Yale, 270 pp., £21, June 1997, 0 300 06680 5
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... of both Basnage and Wachter was the partial similarity of Spinoza’s theories to those of Abraham Cohen Herrera, the great Neo-platonic kabbalist whose classic, Porta de Cielo, had appeared in Latin in 1677, at the same time as Spinoza’s Opera posthuma. Herrera, who had studied with Florentine Platonists and with one of Isaac Luria’s disciples, ended his ...

Orchestrated Panic

Yitzhak Laor: The Never-Ending War, 1 November 2007

1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East 
by Tom Segev, translated by Jessica Cohen.
Little, Brown, 673 pp., £25, May 2007, 978 0 316 72478 4
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... did Helms introduce him to senior figures in the CIA, but he set up a meeting between Amit and Robert McNamara, then the defense secretary: McNamara found Amit’s arguments persuasive, and he conveyed them to Johnson the same evening. The president understood that Israel was going to act; he set up a special task force to handle the situation, headed by ...

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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... battle-cruiser. Funded by the American Jewish Committee, Commentary was edited by Elliot Cohen, perhaps the most interesting character in the book (the only one of true pathos), who wryly informs Podhoretz that the chief dif between Commentary and Partisan Review is that Commentary admits to being a Jewish magazine, PR doesn’t. Commentary’s ...

Higher Man

John Sutherland, 22 May 1997

The Turner Diaries 
by ‘Andrew Macdonald’.
National Vauguard Books, 211 pp., $12.95, May 1978, 0 937944 02 5
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... by the Washington DC ‘gun raids’ of September 1991. These have been sanctioned by the ‘Cohen Act’. Posses of deputised blacks (egged on by the Jewish-owned Washington Post) raid the homes of white people, seizing their weapons and violating the women (recent legislation has decriminalised rape and hard-drug use by African Americans). Washington ...

Joan Didion’s Style

Martin Amis, 7 February 1980

The White Album 
by Joan Didion.
Weidenfeld, 223 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 297 77702 5
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... one about Miss Didion’s shopping-centre – contains more ‘and’s’ than a song by Leonard Cohen: ‘I thought about barrack rats and I thought about Prewitt and Maggio and I thought about Army hatred and it seemed to me that night in Honolulu … ’ That night in Honolulu, that day in Chicago. It is a style that has become set in its own ...

I grew a beard

Christian Lorentzen: Biden on Crack, 3 June 2021

Beautiful Things: A Memoir 
by Hunter Biden.
Gallery, 272 pp., £20, April, 978 1 3985 0719 7
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... He had then been put through the media wringer as head of the Senate judiciary committee during Robert Bork’s failed nomination to the Supreme Court. In February 1988 he had a brain aneurysm, then a pulmonary embolism, and months later a second aneurysm. Beau was in his first year at the University of Pennsylvania, and it had been a lonely time for ...

Arruginated

Colm Tóibín: James Joyce’s Errors, 7 September 2023

Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ 
by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner.
Oxford, 1424 pp., £145, February 2022, 978 0 19 886458 5
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... Notes for Joyce (1974, revised and republished in 1988 as Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman). It shows Joyce as both systematic in his approach to fact and at times struggling, and often failing, in his effort to avoid error. And it makes clear that Ulysses has a mundane source book – Thom’s Directory – to match The Odyssey, its ...

American Breakdown

David Bromwich, 2 August 2018

... as a result of the volume of sabre-rattling or the onset of war with Iran; a decision to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the federal government to extort funds for the wall with Mexico; a sudden intensification of the president’s attacks on his political enemies and accusers in ...
... published in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the ...

I’m an intelligence

Joanna Biggs: Sylvia Plath at 86, 20 December 2018

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. I: 1940-56 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1388 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 0 571 32899 4
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The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. II: 1956-63 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1025 pp., £35, September 2018, 978 0 571 33920 4
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... all-American. We see her earnestness in political matters too when she wrote to a fan, Eddie Cohen, who had sought her out after reading a story she published in Seventeen the summer before she went to Smith. ‘I consider my story not far from the usual Seventeen drivel,’ she wrote. ‘Why is it that my particular brand of drivel rates such subtle ...

Good Activist, Bad Activist

Adam Mars-Jones: ACT UP grows up, 29 July 2021

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-93 
by Sarah Schulman.
Farrar, Straus, 736 pp., £30.99, June, 978 0 374 18513 8
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... a back seat. The first lengthy testimony in the book comes from two men on that committee, Robert Vázquez-Pacheco and Moisés Agosto-Rosario, and shows how much autonomy could exist within the organisation. Vázquez-Pacheco, a Black Puerto Rican born in New York City, made the transition from audience member at meetings to visibility in the simplest ...

Fed up with Ibiza

Jenny Turner: Sybille Bedford, 1 April 2021

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 432 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 1 78474 113 6
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... live again’. A corollary is that it’s only in Quicksands that she writes much about what Lisa Cohen has called ‘the close-knit, fractious lesbian networks of New York, London and Paris’: from Eva to Allanah to Esther to Evelyn and then Eda, with many side projects and much criss-crossing, as Allanah darts off with Eda and then Jane, around the same ...

Nothing he hasn’t done, nowhere he hasn’t been

Adam Shatz: Claude Lanzmann, 5 April 2012

The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir 
by Claude Lanzmann, translated by Frank Wynne.
Atlantic, 528 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 1 84887 360 5
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... page. ‘You are the only one who talked about me as I would have wished,’ the novelist Albert Cohen told him. It was a charmed life, particularly for a Jew who’d spent his youth on the run from the Gestapo and the collaborationist Milice. But the war never really ended for Lanzmann. Seventy-five thousand Jews were deported by Vichy, and, as Beauvoir ...

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