Plus Abbas says he would skip U.N. push, and more in the news Disagreement over Fayyad could be straw that breaks always-tenuous deal Jon Scheyer will play hoops for Maccabi Tel Aviv  | |  A pound of flesh, a lion with a thorn in his paw, an all-powerful book—a new collection of Jewish folktales from Arab lands sheds light on the universality of the genre The folktale is the most unpretentious and democratic form of literature—stories that everyone is free to tell and embellish because they belong to no one in particular. In the early 19th century, the apparent authorlessness of folktales is what made them so appealing to cultural nationalists. If no single person invented a folktale, they reasoned, it must have arisen in some primal, almost mystical way from the mind of the people, the folk. It is no coincidence that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the brothers who first published fairytales like those of Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin, were also the authors of a pioneering German dictionary and works on German legal history. All these activities were designed to prove that while Germans lacked a national state they at least had a national culture. A century later, when Martin Buber published Tales of the Hasidim, he was doing much the same thing, trying to give modern Jews access to a more authentic folk past. More  | Doreen Seidler-Feller, a Los Angeles psychologist, observant Jew, and rabbi's wife, has a thriving practice as a sex therapist to the Orthodox More BY REBECCA SPENCE |  | As much as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg may wish to present himself as an ethnically neutral pragmatist, his Jewishness inevitably plays a role in people's opinion of him More BY ANDREW MARANTZ | |
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