Forward.com

Cultural Critic or Complainer-in-Chief?

Thu, 24 May 2012 06:00:00 EST

SUMMER BOOKS: Jonathan Franzen asks the uncomfortable questions that might force us as a culture to examine the disconcerting answers they beget.

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Hey, Mr. Banana Man

Wed, 23 May 2012 05:00:00 EST

SUMMER BOOKS: Sam Zemurray overthrew governments, may have had Huey Long killed and helped get Israel recognized. Let’s just say he wasn’t your typical Jewish banana guy.

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Time to Come Clean on Shoah Role

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 05:00:00 EST

The French rail company SNCF ferried Jews to death camps. Now that it is bidding for American high-speed rail contracts, the firm faces pressure to come clean.

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Addicted to Love (and Drugs)

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 05:00:00 EST

Two young Jewish writers have come forth to expose the seamy, alcohol-soused underbelly of the American experience. Pretty, they’re not. Hilarious, they are.

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Gene Pinpoints Heritage, Causes Concern

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

A Hispanic town unexpectedly found out residents had a genetic mutation that pointed to Jewish heritage. It also put them at much greater risk of getting breast cancer.

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Addicted to Aggadah

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

As they recover from addiction, Peter Bebergal and Alan Kaufman find creative voices to carry their sensitivity while hanging soberly on to the world.

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The Most Famous English Jew

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:26:00 EST

Was Sir Moses Haim Montefiore the first Jewish celebrity of the modern age? A strong affirmative is the thesis of Abigail Green’s “Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero,” a biography of the most famous Jew of the 19th century.

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Toward a Global Jewish Cinema

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

Following speculative top-100 lists of Jewish movie moments and Jewish movies, the arrival of the more serious ‘The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema’ is timely.

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Muslims Who Helped Save French Jews

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

Benjamin Stora combines history and self-history. He has become embroiled in controversy over the role of Muslims in saving French Jews from the Holocaust.

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If Anne Frank Lived Upstate

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

Shalom Auslander’s major theme in his new novel is the burden of the Jewish past. There is no symbol of that burden more powerful than Anne Frank.

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The Future of Publishing?

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

e-books are a bright spot in the dismal economics of publishing. One in six Americans now uses an e-reader, and that number is growing fast.

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Chicago’s Love And Shame

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

Peter Orner’s ‘Love and Shame and Love’ is a refreshing departure from the shtetl nostalgia shtick that has come to typify contemporary American Jewish fiction.

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After Memories, Modernism

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:00:00 EST

Peter Nadas’s ‘Parallel Stories’ is colossally ambitious. Set in Hungary of 1961 and extending to the falling of the Iron Curtain, it encapsulates an entire civilization.

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The Part-Jewish Question: Double the Pleasure or Twice the Pain?

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:56:00 EST

Read a Forward essay by the late Christopher Hitchens, in which he discusses Jewish genes, the fear that perpetuates antisemitism, and discovering his own Jewish roots late in life.

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Bearing Silent Witness

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 06:00:00 EST

A mother and son are on the run at the start of Aharon Appelfeld’s new novel. The survivor and chronicler of Jewish suffering continues his exploration of the depths of human tragedy.

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How Modern Orthodoxy Flourished On Campus

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 06:00:00 EST

The history of Yavneh was the history of 20th-century American Orthodoxy itself, refracted through the prism of the campus.

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Fictionalizing the Holocaust

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:30:00 EST

Theodor Adorno famously wrote that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What, then, would he make of adaptations of the Holocaust itself — films and books that dramatize Jewish suffering during World War II? Sure these box-office hits and bestsellers help to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, but at what cost? There is something grotesque about the dramatization of the Shoah, and one wonders when commemoration becomes desecration.

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Essays Examine Primo Levi's Humanism

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:00:00 EST

Mass deportation of European Jews to the killing metropolis of Auschwitz began in spring 1942. By January of 1945, more than a million Jews had been murdered there by gas, torture, starvation, medical experimentation and “natural” causes. The catastrophe (an inadequate descriptor, to be sure) lasted about five years; efforts to understand it have lasted more than half a century.

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China's Expert on Kabbalah and Jewish Literature

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:00:00 EST

Ying Han is a nice Chinese girl from Xi’an, the Chinese capital, whose focus has become the translation and dissection of Jewish American literature.

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A Graphic Novel for Kids About Graphic Novelist

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:00:00 EST

Trina Robbins uses documentary photographs and trademark Lily Renée drawings to tell this survivor’s story, and Miriam Katin reviews it in comic form.

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