November 27, 2007 · 1 Comment
Luis de Carvajal the Younger (also Luis de Carabajal) died at the stake in the Inquisition on Dec. 8, 1596, after being tortured and denouncing (and then recanting his confessions) his entire family.
De Carvajal has been the subject of many books, and even an opera (“Carvajal“) in recent years, because of his story’s drama and because he left behind significant written materials, including a memoir and Jewish poems, that were hidden in the Mexican Inquisition’s archives for more than 300 years before being released.
As a result of those writings, de Carvajal is today acknowledged to be the first Jewish author in the New World. (more…)
Categories: Europeans · Inquisition Victims · Rabbis · Writers
Tagged: author, auto-da-fe, autobiography, Inquisition, maimonides, Mexico
The words have not stopped flowing since author Norman Mailer, 84, died November 10, 2007, of renal failure. He has been called a Jewish pugilist, a towering writer with a matching ego, and nothing if not ambitious.
We call him the greatest Jewish-American novelist who never wrote about Jewish subjects. It was Mailer’s ambition to get away from his upbringing as a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn that led him to a life of writing about arts and sports giants like Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali, and murderers and tyrants like Gary Gilmore and Adolph Hitler, rather than subjects closer to his own origins, as his contemporaries Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud have done.
We found two pieces that captured some of Mailer’s Jewish essence, as well as all the other facets of his life.
Mailer and his work was influenced by controversial psychiatrist and sex researcher, Wilhelm Reich, whose 50th yahrzeit passed this month.
Categories: Americans · Celebrities · Hollywood · Journalists · Veterans · Writers
Tagged: ali, author, hitler, mailer, monroe, obituaries, picasso, vietnam
