by Matthew Friedman | Jan 27, 2023 | Essays, Jewish Life, Music
At the end Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis, Kaiser Uberall accepts his fate: he will be sacrificed to restore the balance of life and death that his own arrogance and brutality so tragically upset. It is one of the most powerful moments in 20th century...
by Matthew Friedman | Jan 19, 2023 | Commentary, Essays, Jewish Life
There is a note of tragic foreboding in the twelfth chapter of the first Book of Kings. This is where “Israel rebelled against the house of David” and the Kingdom of Israel, united under Saul, David, and Solomon, is split asunder as Jeroboam, a head man of the tribe...
by Matthew Friedman | Jan 11, 2023 | Essays
I remember the night that my father came home from work with a copy of the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields’ recording of Bach’s The Art of Fugue. It was a double-LP boxed-set (recorded music came on black vinyl discs in those days) with extensive...
by Matthew Friedman | Oct 12, 2022 | Commentary, Essays, Jewish Life
It stopped me dead in my tracks as I was walking down Newark Ave. in Jersey City one morning in the winter of 2016, on my way to the Grove Street Path station: Someone had painted a large black swastika, surrounded by repeated instances of the doppelte Siegrune icon...
by Matthew Friedman | Sep 25, 2022 | Commentary, Essays
Malachy Salter was the great mythical ancestor of my mother’s family. We held him up as a kind of buccaneering merchant hero who operated two privateers under Letters of Marque from King George II and King George III, first out of Boston and then, as was the case of...
by Matthew Friedman | Jul 31, 2022 | Essays
“Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles,” Gustave Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary, “la dorure en reste aux mains.” We must not touch our idols, lest the gilt comes off on our hands. Flaubert’s warning has been echoing in my mind as I have repeatedly scrolled past Annie...