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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Philologos: What’s That On Your Head?
Helen Hill of Miami writes: “My mother, who grew up in a Polish shtetl, used the word perukha in Yiddish to describe a lady’s head covering such as a sheytl or turban. Presumably, this came from perruque, which I believe is French for a wig. But how did French get into shtetl Yiddish?” A sheytl,…
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Avoiding the Siberia of Capitalism, a Life Without Music
You Must Go and Win By Alina Simone Faber and Faber, Inc., 256 pages, $14 I ask for your indulgence while I broadly generalize about young immigrants brought to this country from the former Soviet Union as children, American raised, if not, strictly speaking, eligible for the presidency: There are only two kinds. The first…
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‘Jérusalem’ Arrives Home, Age 164
It’s not often that you arrive for a night at the opera to find protesters waving banners and urging you not to enter. But then again, it’s not often that the Old City of Jerusalem becomes a backdrop for an opera about the emotions of crusaders who came here to conquer. The highlight of the…
The Latest
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June 24, 2011
100 Years In The Forward Hundreds of furious women from Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side nearly started a riot when Elias Birnbaum attempted to open the vegetable store he owns with his wife. The angry women, who live on the block where the vegetable store is located, were upset with Birnbaum, who recently…
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To Bee or Not To Bee
Getting honey for Rosh Hashanah is the least of your problems. Since 2006, farmers and scientists have been worrying about colony collapse disorder — the name of a mysterious syndrome which has killed 5 million bee colonies and literally billions of bees in North America. This is a big problem, and not just because of…
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Music for Murder
Few movie soundtrack composers are perennially contemporary household names, but New York-born Jewish musician Bernard Herrmann, whose June 29 centenary is being celebrated with a year of CD releases and live concerts from Minnesota to Bristol, England, is a noteworthy exception. Herrmann’s name is immortally linked to the oppressively ominous, churningy fear-inducing music he wrote…
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Books Para Español, Oprima el Dos!
Earlier this week, Lévana Kirschenbaum blogged about domestic disputes and gourmet food and Spanish chocolate-chip cookies. 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: As a language enthusiast, I have…
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Building a Collective Consciousness on a National Scale
French-Jewish historian and publisher Pierre Nora is renowned for editing the monumental series of volumes “Lieux de Mémoire” for the French publisher Gallimard. Literally, the title means, “Places of Memory,” and the series is the ultimate repository of modern Gallic concepts of national identity. Its brilliant scholarship was recognized by Columbia University Press, which, from…
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June 17, 2011
100 Years Ago In The Forward When Brooklyn resident Lina Schwartz, opened her door in the middle of the night to find Michael Sanducci asking where he could find her daughter, Tessie, she angrily told him what she had said many times before: “Leave my daughter alone.” But Sanducci refused to leave and Schwartz pushed…
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Tracing Holland’s Forgotten Kindertransport
Miriam Keesing has hundreds of children. The lucky ones are in their 80s, living in countries across the world as disparate as Holland, America, Argentina and Australia. The unfortunate ones died young, mostly in Auschwitz or Sobibor. Though Keesing’s children come from various parts of Germany and Austria, what unites them is that they were…
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Hank Greenberg, Reluctant Jewish Hero
Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want To Be One By Mark Kurlansky Yale University Press, 192 pages, $25 If America truly is in decline, then some of us would ascribe that decline to the cultural euthanasia that made football and basketball more popular than baseball. For my generation of urban children of immigrant Jews,…
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