Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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May 27, 2011
100 Years In The Forward Charles Cohen, a resident of Manhattan’s Orchard Street, was found dead in his bed from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Cohen suffered from rheumatism and was practically paralyzed by the disease. Just three years earlier, he was newly married, healthy and working in an ice factory. But after he came down…
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The Zen of Kosher Scotch
As anyone who has visited the dry garden at the Zen temple Ryoanji, in Kyoto, Japan, can tell you, it’s not just the raw materials that make a site worth visiting. If raked gravel were all it took to attract tourists, then the world’s quarries would be mobbed. Likewise, the aura that surrounds Scottish whisky…
The Latest
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Books Q&A: Novelist Haley Tanner on Love After Death
Haley Tanner’s debut novel, “Vaclav & Lena” (Dial Press), is about love without questions, hesitation or limits. This love flourishes between two Russian-Jewish immigrant children in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn: Vaclav dreams of becoming a magician, like Houdini, and casting the fragile Lena as his assistant. Tragedy temporarily unhinges this plan, and when…
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‘Bach’ to the Future With Wanda Landowska
When Virgil Thomson saw Wanda Landowska perform at New York’s Town Hall in 1942, he wrote in the New York Herald-Tribune, “She plays the harpsichord better than anybody else ever plays anything.” The same year, The New Yorker’s Robert Simon added: “When I’ve heard Mme. Landowska play harpsichord music, the same music has never seemed…
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Books Blowing the Whistle on Illegal Internships
Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy By Ross Perlin Verso, 2011, $22.95 Every year, hundreds of thousands of interns in the U.S. work without pay or for less than minimum wage. Many of these unpaid or underpaid internships are at for-profit companies and closely resemble regular work:…
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Books Scatterbrained, but a Star
Crossposted from Haaretz A large pigeon roosts on the roof of a house in the picture that opens the new edition of “Ha-Mefuzar Mi-Kfar Azar” (“The Absent-Minded Guy from Kefar Azar,” Am Oved, 1968), by Leah Goldberg. Goldberg’s book, based on a work by Russian Jewish writer Samuil Marsha, originally appeared with illustrations that she…
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Books The Furrier, the Psychoanalyst and the Assassin
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. As one unravels the history of the 20th century, it becomes apparent how deeply individual lives were woven into the larger fabric of world events. From the shtetls of Eastern Europe a new generation of Jewish youth emerged whose exploits shook the entire world. Now, after the…
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Picasso’s Muse and Warhol’s, Too
Before Gertrude Stein distinguished herself as an expatriate American writer and patron of artists in Paris, she spent some of her childhood in California, where San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum is now paying tribute to her. “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories,” an exhibition of photographs, paintings and sculptures, focuses on Stein’s personal life — her…
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Books Memory, Scent and My Mother
Earlier this week, Molly Birnbaum wrote about her first writing teacher and the scent of Passover. Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: This past Sunday was Mother’s Day….
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Books András Mezei’s Holocaust Poetry for Our Time
András Mezei (1930-2008) was a major Jewish-Hungarian poet who left behind a retrospective exploration of the Holocaust for our time. There are many voices speaking to us of terror, folly, greed, cruelty and absurdity, but Mezei’s poetry makes them sound like our own voices. His testimony has been published in England, in my translation, as…
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May 20, 2011
100 Years In The Forward Thirteen-year-old Willie Bublik, a resident of Manhattan’s East Harlem, was arrested and handed over to the Children’s Aid Society for slashing the face of 13-year-old Fanny Brodsky. Willie claimed that he did not slash the girl with a knife — he punched her with his fist. Regardless, Fanny required a…
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