Source: Der Standard, December 18, 2012

http://derstandard.at/1355460017586/Das-Juedische-Echo-Hoffnungen-und-Aengste-der-Jugend

In the new issue, which deals with the topic of youth awakening, Zelman’s successor Marta S. Halpart shows good intuition when it comes to good stories and good authors.

Relax, hang out, meet friends, university, job and apartment - in short, find your place in this world: the hopes and fears of young people are quite similar across country and continent borders. Sometimes, however, the desires and real-life opportunities drift apart dramatically.

This is shown in the annual publication “The Jewish Echo” with smart essays, humorous reports, conclusive interviews, concise analyses and loving memories, e.g. of chief editor Leon: Leon Zelman co-founded the “The Jewish Echo” in 1951 and served as the chief editor until his death in 2007.

Intuition for good stories

In the new issue, which deals with the topic of youth awakening, Zelman’s successor Marta S. Halpert shows good intuition when it comes to good stories (she herself conducted an interview with Lotte Tobisch and portrayed a family from Uzbekistan, that moved to Vienna) - and good authors. The playwright Joshua Sobol from Israel describes his adolescent life in Kibbutz Shamir in the late 1950s. The gap between idealism and realism later inspired him to his play “The Night of the 20th.”

Otmar Lahodynsky’s report about youth unemployment is quite dark: Europe’s lost generation. Quite futuristic is the essay by acclaimed U.S. historian Pamela S. Nadell about Jewish self-conception “made in America,” which shows how Jewish and non-Jewish students on university campuses celebrate together and how a Jewish identity is established through shared consume of culture.

Gerhard Roth reflects on his childhood in the “kingdom of silence” and Alan Posener puts the age-struggle in a nutshell: To age with dignity? Forget it.