Critic at Large @WSJ Emblems of Mind: amzn.to/2QZ0fea Portfolio: bit.ly/3YRqNm0
Joined October 2012
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Feb 5
In preparation for a project, I've been going through my @authory portfolio to select highlights. It's a work in progress but, for those interested, here a rough compilation: bit.ly/45U08Jk
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Feb 9
The controversy over the removal of text at Philadelphia's President’s House (@independencenhp) to satisfy the Trump administration, is chronicled in today’s @nyt. We are supposed to mourn the result. But I reviewed this House’s opening in 2010, nyti.ms/3ZmUhZk and found the displays ideologically tendentious and historically flawed. While focusing on the fact that slaves were held in the house, it fails to mention they were accompanied by indentured servants, some of them white, and that the house itself was the site of major political achievements by our founding generation. The exhibition was so tendentious, I wrote a second essay, nyti.ms/4bEzGad, noting: “What we see of the 'upstairs' world is this: unrest (riots opposing Adams’s policy regarding France), protest (against the Jay Treaty), fear (a yellow-fever epidemic) and hypocrisy (Washington is shown with a disdainful look as he awards a medal to a proud Seneca Indian leader). And the architecture of the site makes it seem as though we are standing in an open-air ruin. It is not really a reinterpretation of history; it overturns the idea of history, making it subservient to the claims of contemporary identity politics.” nyti.ms/4bEzGad
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Jan 21
Midsummer: In memory of Tina Packer, who died earlier this month, and provided years of pleasure and thought - stimulants that continue through the company she founded in Lenox, MA @shakeandco. Here is the third of three essays I wrote @nyt, contemplating her productions, this one on “Midsummer Night’s Dream”: nyti.ms/3Nu4qRi
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Jan 21
In memory of Tina Packer, who died earlier this month, and provided years of pleasure and thought - stimulants that continue through the company she founded in Lenox, MA @shakeandco. Here is the second of three essays I wrote @nyt, contemplating her productions, this one on “Coriolanus”: nyti.ms/3YNtjd5
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Jan 21
In memory of Tina Packer, who died earlier this month, and provided years of pleasure and thought – stimulants that continue through the company she founded in Lenox, MA @shakeandco. Here is the first of three essays I wrote @nyt, contemplating her productions, this one on “Merchant of Venice”: nyti.ms/4bug9t9
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Jan 14
On Miami Beach and World’s Fairs, the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower, “late capitalism” and the Ferris Wheel, fairs and museums (“Fairs emphasized the typical, not the singular; the popular, not the elite; the commercial, not the reverential. Museums’ emphases were on the past. World’s fairs invoked the anticipated future.”). I review “World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow” @wolfsonian -FIU @wsjopinion bit.ly/4sAUxBb
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Jan 13
I am putting a nearly complete archive of my published work online as an @Authory portfolio. This includes my essays on music in @newrepublic in the 1980s. I will gradually be adding my reviews and essays in @nyt as well. Essays will also be grouped by publication: authory.com/EdwardRothstein
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23 Dec 2025
For no reason whatsoever - the holiday season? a year that itself seemed a hangover? - here is my 2007 @nyt column hailing the return of absinthe, the drink of bohemian modernism. Van Gogh threw a glass at Gaugin. Munch chugged it, Wilde acidly assessed it: "“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”
bit.ly/4arbxmX
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18 Dec 2025
A reminder of the important questions raised by Norman #Podhoretz that shaped neo-conservativism - and their anticipation in the opposing views of Camus and Sartre: my 2004 @nyt column: nyti.ms/4qgn8da
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17 Dec 2025
"Norman Podhoretz is not one of my ex-friends," I wrote in 1999 in nyti.ms/4aEVvpN . He never became one. But he was, in a small way, the opposite. He will be missed.
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17 Dec 2025
A stunning array of 139 menorahs spanning two millennia and four continenets @TheJewishMuseum ....but I also raise questions: on.wsj.com/4qemAVg
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17 Dec 2025
On @TheJewishMuseum and the tensions of Hanukkah, the Jews of India and the Jews of the avant-garde, the non-centrality of “tikkun olam” and the centrality of asserting it, cultural interactions and the strange absence of Zionism, the global Diaspora and the “Jewish social activist tradition.” A mix of praise for the museum’s new director, James S. Snyder, and misgivings about the museum’s post-1960s mission in my review of TheJewishMuseum new installations @wsjopinion on.wsj.com/4qemAVg
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27 Oct 2025
It should be an interesting evening, discussing Mamdani and the Jews with my friend/colleague David Firestone and fellow journalist Alyssa Katz:
emjc.org/event/nightshul-liv…
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7 Oct 2025
Wonderful news for @CBSNews, which will be strengthened and perhaps even reformed by the presence and generosity and spirited intelligence of @bariweiss. I paid her tribute and worried over the trajectory of @nytimes in 2020 for @DIEZEIT : bit.ly/2Fdk1BT
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Edward Rothstein retweeted
4 Oct 2025
On wokeness and the Smithsonian, Smithson and his gift, Identity Museums and embedded activism: I review “Smthson’s Gamble” @wsjbooks on.wsj.com/4gRTvLE
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9 Sep 2025
On Persian observatories and Christian constellations, Islamic astronomy and Western science, Jewish cosmology and stellar cosmologists. I review a fascinating exhibition, "Mapping the Heavens" @nelson_atkins @WSJopinion : bit.ly/3Idbj71
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