Last week I visited Astana, Kazakhstan, for the World Nomad Games My piece Hyphen - featuring horse-meat and potatoes, a goat moulage, and the world’s oldest board game launched into space hyphenonline.com/2024/09/19/wor…

Here I am, disillusioned, retreating into the world of (E.T.A. Hoffman, Alexandre Dumas, and) the Nutcracker this Christmas. My latest column for The Berliner Magazine: the-berliner.com/stage/berlin-c…

This line from Berger&Bielski: "Each of us comes into the world with her or his unique possibility—which is like an aim, or, if you wish, almost like a law. The job of our lives is to become—day by day, year by year, more conscious of that aim so that it can at last be realized."

At DT this weekend Pınar Karabulut takes on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew: "We see a woman to whom violence is done – and it’s framed as a comedy!...look at what’s going on in Avignon with this trial right now." For The Berliner Magazine the-berliner.com/stage/pinar-ka…

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

My latest essay for The Baffler, which elaborates and expands on the piece I wrote about Jews in Germany for the magazine last year, via a number of woeful depictions of Berlin in recent Anglophone literature thebaffler.com/salvos/breakin…

“A man's character is his fate" has not aged well.

Hey Berlin Theatergoers! A question: What have been the best theatre deals (theatertage at BE, 15 Euro at DT; Platzfrei at Schaubühne etc…) that you’ve experienced in Berlin‘s theaters? Also curious about one-off giveaways… When did you get a big performance for a small fee?

Costume designers might not be on stage, but their impact on the show is, as Vanessa Sampaio Borgmann says, "the first thing you see." New interview with the designer of 85 (85!) costumes for Schaubühne Berlin's Glaube, Geld, Krieg & Liebe for The Berliner Magazine: the-berliner.com/stage/berlin-v…

There is a ceasefire deal, so I want to share this story from my past year reporting inside the State Dept. trying to answer the central question of Biden’s foreign policy: How did the U.S. let Israel get away with widespread horrors in Gaza? 1/

Every life, a universe

My 2024 in theatre…

Berlin has strong representation at this year’s Theatertreffen. Among the 10 most remarkable pieces this year are Hakan Savaş Mican‘s Unser Deutschlandmärchen (Maxim Gorki Theater), Florentina Holzinger‘s SANCTA (Volksbühne), and René Pollesch‘s ja nichts ist okay (Volksbühne).

Incredibly brave, tender, transformative film. Shame on you-know-who for inciting a lunatic mob of right-wingers on Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם ‘s family with signature German rhetoric of antisemitic anti-antisemitism (Adorno face-palm moment) which is a danger to all Jews who resist fascism.

“Around a hundred years ago, hidden away at the back of a forgotten restaurant on Mitte’s Hirtenstraße—close to where the Babylon cinema stands today—there once existed a miniature replica of King Solomon’s Temple. Historians say the original temple was demolished in 586 BCE, but

The film The Klezmer Project, writes Sanders Isaac Bernstein, suggests a new ethic of diasporism—rejecting both the violence of Zionism and the sentimental dream of recovering a Yiddish past. Now online from our Fall/Winter 2024 issue: jewishcurrents.org/sonic-bloom

I wrote about The Klezmer Project, a beautiful film that plays with fact & fiction, present & past, urging us to conceive of culture beyond blood and nation, for Jewish Currents. Thank you, Nathan & Nora, for your edits of & support for this essay, years in the making.