Critic at Large @WSJ Emblems of Mind: amzn.to/2QZ0fea Portfolio: bit.ly/3YRqNm0
Brooklyn, New York
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In preparation for a project, I've been going through my @authory portfolio to select highlights. It's a work in progress but, for those interested, here a rough compilation: bit.ly/45U08Jk
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Whatever the failures will be during the 9/11 commemorations this week – and @NYCMayor Mamdani’s attempt to deflect their cultural and political significance by declaring a “day of service” is just one of them – many will surely reflect the continuing resistance to recognizing the attacks as expressions of Islamist and third-worldist ideologies that continue to flourish. In the meantime, memorials have generally been strangely private and personal. The attack on the Pentagon, for example, is memorialized by benches organized by birth years of the dead. And here was my complaint about the 9/11 museum when it opened: nyti.ms/1oZEr0y
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I was wrong about 9/11 and wrong about 10/7. I thought, in both cases, the lessons would have been clear. In neither case have they been learned – even three years after I admitted the errors in @Tabletmag: bit.ly/3MBwUW2
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So @NYCMayor Mamdani has declared the 25th anniversary of 9/11 should be a “Day of Remembrance and Service.” Imagine if that approach had followed the Pearl Harbor attacks! No need for militarism or battle, no sacrifice required, no risk undergone. The only thing is that in that case, the notion’s disingenuous pose might have been more obvious than it apparently is today.
But the Mayor can’t take full blame. On 9/11’s tenth anniversary, President Obama’s White House tried the same approach declaring a National Day of Service and Remembrance. White House memos urged that commemorations “emphasize the positive” and create a “spirit of unity.” The devotion to "service" would help communities withstand “whatever dangers may come — be they terrorist attacks or natural disasters.” And behold, 9/11 dissolves into pap… My 2011 essay: nyti.ms/3jW0c3u
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How depraved can art get? And how depraved can the philosophy of art become?
My review of "Depraved" by Daisy Dixon @WSJopinion
on.wsj.com/4y24Dx3
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The controversy over the removal of text at Philadelphia's President’s House (@independencenhp) to satisfy the Trump administration, is chronicled in today’s @nyt. We are supposed to mourn the result. But I reviewed this House’s opening in 2010, nyti.ms/3ZmUhZk and found the displays ideologically tendentious and historically flawed. While focusing on the fact that slaves were held in the house, it fails to mention they were accompanied by indentured servants, some of them white, and that the house itself was the site of major political achievements by our founding generation. The exhibition was so tendentious, I wrote a second essay, nyti.ms/4bEzGad, noting: “What we see of the 'upstairs' world is this: unrest (riots opposing Adams’s policy regarding France), protest (against the Jay Treaty), fear (a yellow-fever epidemic) and hypocrisy (Washington is shown with a disdainful look as he awards a medal to a proud Seneca Indian leader). And the architecture of the site makes it seem as though we are standing in an open-air ruin. It is not really a reinterpretation of history; it overturns the idea of history, making it subservient to the claims of contemporary identity politics.” nyti.ms/4bEzGad
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Midsummer: In memory of Tina Packer, who died earlier this month, and provided years of pleasure and thought - stimulants that continue through the company she founded in Lenox, MA @shakeandco. Here is the third of three essays I wrote @nyt, contemplating her productions, this one on “Midsummer Night’s Dream”: nyti.ms/3Nu4qRi
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In memory of Tina Packer, who died earlier this month, and provided years of pleasure and thought - stimulants that continue through the company she founded in Lenox, MA @shakeandco. Here is the second of three essays I wrote @nyt, contemplating her productions, this one on “Coriolanus”: nyti.ms/3YNtjd5
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In memory of Tina Packer, who died earlier this month, and provided years of pleasure and thought – stimulants that continue through the company she founded in Lenox, MA @shakeandco. Here is the first of three essays I wrote @nyt, contemplating her productions, this one on “Merchant of Venice”: nyti.ms/4bug9t9
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On Miami Beach and World’s Fairs, the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower, “late capitalism” and the Ferris Wheel, fairs and museums (“Fairs emphasized the typical, not the singular; the popular, not the elite; the commercial, not the reverential. Museums’ emphases were on the past. World’s fairs invoked the anticipated future.”). I review “World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow” @wolfsonian -FIU @wsjopinion bit.ly/4sAUxBb
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I am putting a nearly complete archive of my published work online as an @Authory portfolio. This includes my essays on music in @newrepublic in the 1980s. I will gradually be adding my reviews and essays in @nyt as well. Essays will also be grouped by publication: authory.com/EdwardRothstein
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For no reason whatsoever - the holiday season? a year that itself seemed a hangover? - here is my 2007 @nyt column hailing the return of absinthe, the drink of bohemian modernism. Van Gogh threw a glass at Gaugin. Munch chugged it, Wilde acidly assessed it: "“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”
bit.ly/4arbxmX
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A reminder of the important questions raised by Norman #Podhoretz that shaped neo-conservativism - and their anticipation in the opposing views of Camus and Sartre: my 2004 @nyt column: nyti.ms/4qgn8da
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"Norman Podhoretz is not one of my ex-friends," I wrote in 1999 in nyti.ms/4aEVvpN . He never became one. But he was, in a small way, the opposite. He will be missed.
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A stunning array of 139 menorahs spanning two millennia and four continenets @TheJewishMuseum ....but I also raise questions: on.wsj.com/4qemAVg
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On @TheJewishMuseum and the tensions of Hanukkah, the Jews of India and the Jews of the avant-garde, the non-centrality of “tikkun olam” and the centrality of asserting it, cultural interactions and the strange absence of Zionism, the global Diaspora and the “Jewish social activist tradition.” A mix of praise for the museum’s new director, James S. Snyder, and misgivings about the museum’s post-1960s mission in my review of TheJewishMuseum new installations @wsjopinion on.wsj.com/4qemAVg
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It should be an interesting evening, discussing Mamdani and the Jews with my friend/colleague David Firestone and fellow journalist Alyssa Katz:
emjc.org/event/nightshul-liv…
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