Hungarian-born photographer Sylvia Plachy immigrated to the United States in 1958. She is best known for her photographs in the Village Voice. Plachy’s solo shows include exhibitions at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts, and venues in Canada, Europe, and China. Plachy’s award-winning books include Unguided Tour (1990); Red Light, a photographic essay on the sex industry (1996); and Self Portrait with Cows Going Home, a personal history of Eastern Europe (2004). In 2004, Plachy received the Women in Photography International Distinguished Photographer Award.
There was a rumpled old Polish man who boarded in the apartment of our building’s superintendent. With baggy pants, fraying suspenders, a wrinkled hat, and a wooden cane, he looked like the lovable…
The masterpiece of eighteenth-century Ladino literature is the encyclopedic commentary on the Bible, Me‘am lo‘ez (From a People of Foreign Tongue), by Jacob Huli, the first volume of which was…
To Freud, all forms of religious observance were foolish and superstitious. His wife Martha, on the other hand, took religion much more seriously, as her grandfather had been a prominent rabbi in…