Top Rootless Posts of 2008

It isn't quite 10 (hey, I didn't start my Jewish Currents gig until April of this year) but I thought I'd do a totally biased and unbalanced recap of a (partial) year's blogging at Rootless Cosmopolitan.

Some of my posts were simply about my life as a freelancer. For example, the drama of the local kosher bakery. Many of you wondered about what I look like and I helpfully responded.

I certainly wasn't the first writer to appropriate the Rootless rubric, and this year I wasn't the last. Ruth Gruber, blogging for JTA, briefly tried on Rootlessness for size, before deciding she was Ruthless. Well played!

In May I introduced a new feature to honor the founding editor of Jewish Currents, Morris Schappes. Morris had a regular feature called The Editor's Diary in which he did the equivalent of blogging about his life as a Jewish intellectual about town. I decided to cover my own cultural wanderings in an homage to Morris, the Web Editor's Diary.

Curiously, May also featured the absolute most googled page on my blog, this tribute to two great ladies of the stage, Bea Arthur and Angela Lansbury.

In June I attended a Nextbook event and became obsessed with a liger in Yiddish clothes, Ruth Wisse. I wrote my column for Currents about her, and my blog entry about her got picked up by JTA.

In July I left New York for a turbulent month of Yiddish study in Vilnius, Lithuania. While I was there the JCC was attacked and all of us waited nervously to see what the government's reaction would be.

Lately I've been spending more time in the Jewish Currents archive. I was delighted to find a heated exchange of letters about The Way We Were from around the time of its release.

The upcoming January-February issue features more of my research from the Currents archive.

I hope you'll subscribe, and I hope you've enjoyed reading this blog. Please let me know what you like to read and what you'd like to see more of.