This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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A Portrait of the Con Artist as Albanian-American
MY NEW AMERICAN LIFE By Francine Prose HarperCollins, 320 pages, $25.99 Francine Prose’s light-hearted new novel, “My New American Life,” could be renamed “A Portrait of the Con Artist as a Young Immigrant.” In this case, the artist of sorts in question is Lula, and she is a weaver of tales, a woman making sense…
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Books Behind ‘Farm 54’: The Making of ‘Houses’
Earlier this week, Galit and Gilad Seliktar shared the making of the first story and the second story in “Farm 54.” In their final post, they share the background behind “Houses,” the third story in their graphic novel. Galit and Gilad Seliktar’s posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the…
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Books The Best Way To Play Charades
“The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City” By Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti Faber and Faber, 174 pages, $13 “The Chairs Are Where the People Go” is the name of a chapter in Misha Glouberman’s book, as well its title. It is also one of the…
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July 22, 2011
100 Years In The Forward Has anybody seen Abie Levitt’s wife? The Levitts moved with their son to Portland, Ore., from New York a few years ago. Not long after, Rosie Levitt started making noises about how the family should move back to New York. Abie didn’t want to go back — he was making…
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Engineering Epic Poetry
‘A’ Louis Zukofsky New Directions, 846 pages, $24.95 ANEW: COMPLETE SHORTER POETRY Louis Zukofsky New Directions, 384 pages, $18.95 Accepted to Columbia University in 1920, 16-year-old Louis Zukofsky was planning a career in engineering. Instead, the son of Lithuanian immigrants Pinchos and Chana Zukofsky became one of America’s leading Modernist poets and co-founder of the…
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Intense Psycho-Dancing
WHEN WE DANCED ON WATER By Evan Fallenberg Harper Perennial, 272 pages, $14.99 Israeli writer Evan Fallenberg has now twice asked readers to sit inside the heads of difficult people and give them the unconditional love that their most intimate relations struggle to fully provide. In both of his novels — the critically acclaimed and…
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The Triumph and Tragedy of Counter-Cultural Judaism
HOLY BEGGARS: A JOURNEY FROM HAIGHT STREET TO JERUSALEM By Aryae Coopersmith One World Lights, 400 pages, $18 ‘Holy Beggars” is a much anticipated account of San Francisco’s House of Love and Prayer, which served as an important home of the Jewish counter-culture from 1967 to 1971, and its spiritual leader, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. It…
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Books Behind ‘Farm 54’: The Making of ‘Spanish Perfume’
On Monday, Galit and Gilad Seliktar shared the making of the first story in “Farm 54,” “The Substitute Lifeguard.” Today, they share the background behind “Spanish Perfume,” the second story in their graphic novel. Galit and Gilad Seliktar’s posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and…
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Books Harvey Pekar, Our Mensch in Cleveland
Jeff Newelt is editor of the Pekar Project and the forthcoming “Harvey Pekar’s CLEVELAND.” If I had my druthers I’d do a universal search/replace on the Internet, find all instances of Harvey Pekar, who died one year ago at age 70, being lazily labeled a “curmudgeon,” and switch each misnomer to “mensch.” It’s not that…
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A Queen Honored, a King and a Jester Premiered
The offerings of the 33rd Moscow International Film Festival, which ended earlier in July, were like the dishes on a dinner table in a hospitable Russian house: generously overflowing, but served in no apparent logical order. It was no surprise to those invited, then, that some of the films in the festival’s many programs and…
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The Portrait of a Renegade British Rabbi Struggling To Maintain Faith and Intellect
Originally published in the Forward October 29, 1999. BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT By Louis Jacobs Littman, 272 pages, $39.50 My first encounter with the complexities and occasional hypocrisies of Orthodox Jewish politics took place in London 26 years ago. I was then a pious and rather naive rabbinical student at Jews’ College, England’s establishment Orthodox seminary….
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