My Club

For twenty years, the Park Slope Food Coop gave me groceries, community, and a place to belong. Then came the boycott vote.
By Amy Sohn

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Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.

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My Club

By Amy Sohn
My relationship with the Park Slope Food Coop (pronounced “co-op”), on Union Street in Brooklyn, outlasted my marriage. I was pregnant when I joined in 2004, and there was no doubt that my husband and I, who lived a block away, would take advantage of this treasure of organic and gourmet foods as we planned for our new arrival. We separated in 2019, and in the unspoken divorce arrangement, I got the Coop, and he left as soon as he could.  Founded in 1973, the 17,000-member Park Slope Food Coop requires all members to work a two-hour, 45-minute shift every…

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Blake Smith: How does Christianity help us mediate, as you suggest, between the worst sort of collectivism and the worst sort of individualism? Or perhaps mediate is the wrong word, since these two “worsts” do so often go together! Let’s say, transcend?
Julius Krein: I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than Christianity’s consciousness of the division between the City of God and the City of Man, “render unto Caesar,” and so on. But this distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic religions as well as ancient paganism and, I would argue, “rational” philosophy. This distance allows for another dimension or perspective from which to approach the relationship between the individual and the collective.