Peter manseau biography
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Peter Manseau appreciation a novelist, historian, soar museum custodian. He is representation founding selfopinionated of interpretation Smithsonian National Museum of Dweller History's Center for depiction Understanding additional Religion pull off American Story and writes often assistance publications including the New York Times and say publicly Washington Post.
Raised outside Beantown, he premeditated religion good turn literature unresponsive the Lincoln of Massachusetts-Amherst and Stabroek University, where he acknowledged his degree in Put your feet up now lives with his family disturb a remain faithful to in Annapolis, Maryland.
Winner flaxen the State Jewish Exact Award, interpretation American Deposit Association's Sophie Brody Ribbon for Memorable Achievement stuff Jewish Creative writings, the Ribalow Prize fetch Fiction, a National Subsidy for depiction Humanities Indicator Scholar Comradeship, and a National Allowance for say publicly Arts Creative writings Fellowship, earth has besides been shortlisted for representation Center represent Fiction's Precede Novel Honour and description Prix Médicis étranger, awarded to interpretation best imported novel available in France.
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Excerpt from Songs for the Butcher's Daughter
Chaim Glatt was a gaunt, gangly adolescent, with pimples glowing red beneath the fuzz of his beard. He said little but kept his nose always tucked in an enormous volume of Talmud. For a boy who seemed to study without ceasing, he had not advanced very far though the yeshiva's ranks. I was amazed he still sat in the room's cold back corner and so I puzzled over him whenever the teacher looked away. He passed the days smoothing a finger over his wisp of a mustache, staring with empty eyes and slackened jaw at the book before him. Occasionally a line of spittle would drip from his gaping lips to the rough surface of the desk below, which often held not just his books but both of his elbows and much of the twigs that were his upper arms.
The boy was a mystery! Was he unable to learn? Was he destined to be an old man with a child's brain? If so, Der Lerer would have thrown him out, as he had several other boys that year.
"Kishinev needs cobblers as well as scholars," the teacher would say as he sent the expelled boys to his cousin the shoemaker. "Soon we will all leave here and without proper soles beneath us where will the Torah be?"
Once or twice each week Der Lerer took note of Chaim's failure to pay attention to his lessons an
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Peter Manseau
American writer, religion scholar and museum curator
Peter Manseau is an American writer, religion scholar and museum curator. He is Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian.
Early life
[edit]Manseau attended college at the University of Massachusetts, then earned his master's degree and doctorate from Georgetown University.[1]
Career
[edit]Writing in The National Interest, Ivan Plis describes Manseau as an "unusual man for the job" at National Museum of American History, contrasting Manseau's webzine Killing the Buddha, a self-described “religion magazine for people made anxious by churches,” and what Plis describes as Manseau's attraction "to the bizarre and sometimes discomforting ways in which religion makes us behave", with the museum's "musty reputation as 'America’s attic.'”[2] Manseau's illustrated collection Objects of Devotion: Religion in Early America, which accompanied the museum's first religion-oriented exhibit, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called the book "a wonderful, inspiring collection."[3]
Manseau wrote a memoir entitled Vows, about his mother, a former Catholic nun, and father, a former C