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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Sorcerer for the Goose and Gander
A reader who may prefer to remain anonymous sends me an email in which he describes recently hearing his sister call his elderly mother a “machashefer,” a term with which he was not familiar. The letter continues: “I asked my sister what she meant by ‘machashefer,’ and she said it’s a witch. She then told…
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The Future of Publishing?
There is no doubt that e-books are a bright spot in the dismal economics of publishing. The current market is strong — according to a recent Harris Interactive poll, one in six Americans now uses an e-reader, and that number will grow as consumers become more comfortable with the technology. Actually, the potential for growth…
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Chicago’s Love And Shame
Love and Shame and Love By Peter Orner Little, Brown, 448 pages, $24.99 Part epic, part bildungsroman, 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. Orner’s characters are complex, but their quirks, like their Jewishness, are the stuff…
The Latest
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After Memories, Modernism
Parallel Stories By Péter Nádas Translated by Imre Goldstein Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1,152 pages, $40 Published in 1986, during the waning days of János Kádár’s stewardship of Hungarian communism (and translated into English in 1997), Péter Nádas’s “A Book of Memories” represented for Susan Sontag the culmination of her hopes for the high modernist…
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Books From Scratch
Earlier this week, Stanley Ginsberg wrote about the meaning of a Jewish bakery and the sweet and sour sides of life. His 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: One…
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Bintel Briefs Way Ahead of Times
The explosive popularity of the Yiddish advice column published in the Forverts from 1906 paved the way first for a genre and then an entire industry. Although it seems self-evident to us now, writing to a newspaper for advice was a revolutionary idea. Click to view a slideshow. The Bintel Brief (literally “bundle of letters”)…
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Saved by Kvass
Translated by Miriam Hoffman and Beverly Koenigsberg This story originally appeared in the Forverts of August 30, 1985. In addition to the 200 major languages currently in use, new forms of expression continue to emerge. These new means of communication deal for the most part with specialized professions — such as linguistics, psychology, statistics and…
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How ‘Sh— Girls Say’ Changed My Life
Earlier this month a humor video called “Shit Girls Say” hit the web. I found it mildly amusing, but not necessarily funny or cutting enough to deserve the over 7 million hits it would get in a few weeks. But then it kind of changed my life. The shtick with “Shit Girls Say,” which began…
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Adrienne Cooper Embodied Progressive Spirit
It is hard to imagine the world without Adrienne Cooper, a friend said to me on learning that she was near death. As she did for so many others, she enriched my life for decades with thrilling song, wise words, and trenchant humor. She is perhaps best known as a concert and recording artist, one…
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Israeli Modern Dance Goes Global
In Neve Tzedek, the old Yemenite neighborhood of Tel Aviv, sounds of prayer from small synagogues in Ottoman period buildings are almost drowned out by the hubbub from bustling cafes and noisy tourist groups exploring alleyways and passing refurbished buildings outfitted with ground-floor galleries and small shops selling the newest fashions. It’s a surprise, though,…
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Books Q&A: David Shipler on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
It has been 25 years since David K. Shipler published his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land.” Shipler wrote the book following a five-year stint as Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times. He has also worked for the Times as a reporter in Saigon, Moscow bureau chief…
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