The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
Dec 2005/Jan 2006
Local
Family Feud: Will the Real Satmar Please Stand Up?
by Jenny ClevstromLocal
Here’s a tale—Shakespearian in drama—of feuding Hasidic brothers, sons of a grand rabbi with worldwide spiritual power, fighting over succession in a neighborhood otherwise spared from fraternity bar brawls.
A Benediction
by Eleanor BaderLocal
Growing up in Bridgeport, Connecticut—the first city in the U.S. to declare bankruptcy—I knew few professionals. The women in my parent’s circle were housewives, waitresses and secretaries, and those men who weren’t disabled were truck drivers, salesmen or construction workers. I never heard anyone described as a community organizer.
A Dividing Wall
by Megan BahreeLocal
Dede Alpert, a native of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, shakes her head as she looks at a comic comparing the Israeli-Palestinian relationship with apartheid in South Africa. The comic strip depicts a conversation between the narrator and an African-American person. “To Palestinians Sharon is a butcher, a modern day Dracula,” it reads. “Fenced out, bricked away, sealed off, barred from the lands where their fathers tired for thousands of years. Reminds me of what happened in South Africa – running folks off their own land and then boxing them off on little pieces of land.”
Rich Man, Poor Man: A History of Fort Greene
by Carl Hancock RuxLocal
“The poverty stricken condition of the inhabitants residing in the [Fort Green*/Clinton Hill district] of Brooklyn render it almost an unknown land,” or so claimed an article published in the New York Times titled “Homes of the Poor.”
