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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Full of Sound and Fury
The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture By David Mamet Sentinel, 256 pages, $27.95 Since this is about David Mamet, let’s get right to the point. Mamet the dramatist, the prolific playwright, screenwriter and director, is now taking on the Big American Questions — religion and politics — in prose. Mamet’s 2006 “The…
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We Will, We Will Rock You
Plus ça change, plus ça reste le même chose. The dispute that has recently arisen in Israel concerning the wording of the Yizkor prayer for fallen soldiers, said on the country’s annual Yom ha-Zikaron, or Memorial Day, reminds one of nothing so much as a similar quarrel that nearly delayed the Jewish state’s declaration of…
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Books The Voice
On Monday, David Albahari explained the motive behind the madness of one-paragraph novels. 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 think it was Saul Bellow who once said…
The Latest
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Sex, Violence and Growing Up On a Farm in Israel
Farm 54 By Galit and Gilad Seliktar Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 136 pages, $25 Why is it that graphic novels are so much more interesting these days than their prose siblings? It’s not simply because they can be read more quickly and so better accommodate our diminishing, Twitterized attention spans — it’s also because contemporary comics artists…
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Books Gabrielle Giffords Memoir in the Works
It has no title or publication date yet, but you might want to add this book to your reading list now. Mark Kelly, NASA astronaut and husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, announced today that he and his wife are working on a memoir about their life together, before and after Giffords was shot January 8…
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Books One-Paragraph Novels
David Albahari is the Serbian-born Canadian author, most recently, of the novel “Leeches.” The book is a feat of magic, an existential philosophical novel that’s also funny and with enough mysteries to keep the reader guessing. It’s also one long paragraph — that’s right, a 300-page-long paragraph. Here, Albahari explains the motive behind his madness….
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A Frothy, Farce Charts a Route to Interracial Peace
There’s definitely something in the water over there in France. In director Michel Leclerc’s new feature film, “The Names of Love” (which should really be named “Make Love, Not War,” but more on that later), stupidity is fetching, assimilation is absurd and all it takes to solve the Arab-Jewish problem is — sex. The part…
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Books Poetic Resources of Jewish Folklore: Three Works by Howard Schwartz
In a recent article in the Jewish Review of Books titled “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia,” Michael Weingrad argued that dark, Gothic fantasy writing does not sit well with the Jewish weltanschauung, and that by and large, we simply do not have that kind of literature. This is because, as Weingrad compellingly puts it,…
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Father’s Day
My grandparents’ lake house was the final resting place for household possessions that had been replaced but were too good to throw away. As a result, when we were out there, we ate off unmatched dishes while sitting on unmatched chairs. We slept on ancient sheets beneath heavy quilts that smelled of the must of…
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Books The Tragic Lives and Loves of Joyce’s Russian Translators
June 16 is Bloomsday, the day when Leopold Bloom, the Jewish-descended protagonist of James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” took his quasi-Homeric one-day odyssey through Dublin. It’s the day when Dubliners and Joyce’s fans throughout the world celebrate the legacy of the great Irish novelist, whose protagonist transcends all cultural and temporal borders while remaining both Irish…
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The Erosion of the Holocaust
THE END OF THE HOLOCAUST By Alvin H. Rosenfeld Indiana University Press, 328 pages, $29.95 The impact of the Holocaust on contemporary culture has been enormous; less recognized has been the impact of contemporary culture on what we think of as “the Holocaust.” The main thrust of Alvin Rosenfeld’s “The End of the Holocaust” is…
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