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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Books
Historical Figure Fixation
Lavie Tidhar’s most recent novel is “Osama” (PS Publishing). 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: I might be obsessed with historical figures. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing. But…
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A Sneak Preview of Itzhak Perlman
Itzhak spoke to Yitzchok in Hebrew. Hankus spoke to Yitzchok in Yiddish. The conductor made puns in English with a heavy accent that is Australian and South African. And this all happened in the studio where Bruce Springsteen recorded “Born To Run” and Madonna laid down her vocal tracks for “Like a Virgin.” We’re talking,…
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Cheers! We’re Not Poisoned — Or Are We?
Two interesting comments have come from readers about [my November 25 column][1] on the Jewish toast “l’chaim,” which I traced back to a medieval custom, still practiced by Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews, that is connected to the Kiddush, the traditional Sabbath and holiday blessing over wine. The first of these, from Harold Zvi Slutzkin…
The Latest
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To Understand and Equate, Passionately
It says something about the fraught history of North African Jewry that one of its most vivid authors of today was inspired to write a reminiscence of her youth not by dipping a Proustian madeleine into her tea, but by almost being crushed by a train. Colette Fellous, who was born in Tunis in 1950…
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Looking Back: December 16, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward Haym Soloveitchik, otherwise known as the Brisker Rov, is one of the best-known scholars among contemporary rabbis. Considered one of Jewish law’s top authorities, people turn to him from all over the world with their legal queries. For the young generation, Soloveitchik is regarded as a fanatic who is…
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Books Jews, Non-Jews, and Being Losers Together
Earlier this week, Matthue Roth blogged about publishing a real life old-fashioned book and getting up early. 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: Yesterday, I put out a…
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Talented Life of Diane Arbus Reconsidered
An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus By William Todd Schultz Bloomsbury, 256 pages, $25 Although William Todd Schultz reminds his readers that photographer Diane Arbus remains something of a mystery, he promises that his new psychobiography, “An Emergency in Slow Motion,” will provide the needed password. It will unlock secrets….
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Majdanek Survivors Return To Dig Up Treasures
‘Buried Prayers,” directed by Steven Meyer, stretches the definitions of Holocaust-related cinema by examining not only what happened on the unholy ground of the World War II death camp Majdanek, but also what happened underneath it. In the spring of 1943, survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto were sent to Majdanek just outside Lublin, Poland, and…
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Books Writers Should Get Up Early
Yesterday, Matthue Roth blogged about publishing a real life old-fashioned book. 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: As a glutton for torture (and as a recent parent, which…
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Puppet Golem Strikes Again
In the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre’s production of “Golem,” the people are puppets (except for a ghost), and the man of clay is danced by a human being (Steven Ryan). And that’s how it should be, for although he doesn’t speak, Golem is a stand-in for man. He’s a creature who didn’t ask to be born,…
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Vayishlach — Jacob Sent
Genesis 32:4–36:42 Jacob and What Isn’t Accomplished by Force As we’ve noted, more than half the weekly portions in the Book of Genesis deal with Jacob, his personal history and his difficult family. It’s no surprise, then, that his character and profile are depicted in much finer detail in the Torah than any of his…
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