Faculty Writing: On Appreciating Marilyn Monroe, and Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt

• Tagged:
• Feminism
• Hollywood
• Jewish Studies
• Tom Stoppard

Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Sophie Lewis reflects on her deep and long-standing appreciation of Marilyn Monroe, ventures some reasons as to why mass appreciation of this femme icon has been late in arriving, and praises a new generation of Marilyn-loving feminists for their “ethos that posits machismo and femmephobia as two sides of the same coin.”

And, in the Daily Scroll, David Sugarman reviews Tom Stoppard’s latest—and most personal—play, Leopoldstadt, which “presents four generations of a largely assimilated clan as each navigates the tempest of Jewish life in Europe” from the fin-de-siècle through the aftermath of the Shoah, moving “from an argument about the possibilities of the Jewish future” to a mourning of the irrevocable past.