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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Anxieties About Moving to Suburbia
Americans are on the move, in retreat from rising floodwaters, mounting mortgages and economic uncertainty. It’s gotten so that we’re hard-pressed to remember a time when the nation’s citizenry relocated from place to place volitionally, on its own steam, a time when mobility tracked upward rather than sideways or backward. I’m prompted to think, and…
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The Language Bibi and Bam Used
“On the Same Page?” asked a front-page caption of the June 3 edition of the Forward, beneath which were parallel excerpts from President Barack Obama’s May 19 speech on U.S. policy in the Middle East and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s May 24 Congressional address. The second pair of matching quotes had the U.S. president saying:…
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Beneath Black Hats and Shtreimels
It used to be that if you saw a Hasid in a movie or a TV show, he (and it was nearly always a “he”) was there as a visual signifier of urban diversity and little more. Hasidim appeared only in crowd scenes, or in montages intent on showing the multicultural essence of the American…
The Latest
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Books Hungarian Modernist László Krasznahorkai’s Inner Animal
For almost a decade now, [New Directions Publishing][1] has doggedly been bringing the late, late Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai’s novels of impassioned decrepitude and finely cadenced apocalypticism into English. Next year will see the much-anticipated translation of his “Satantango.” To tide us over until then we now have the publication in the Cahiers Writing and…
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Books Chocolate Chip Cookies: CCC? Sisisi!
Yesterday, Lévana Kirschenbaum blogged about domestic disputes and gourmet food. 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: We all think of cookies as a short-lived and vaguely illicit pleasure….
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Books Evangelical Group’s Attempt To Convert Dominique Strauss-Kahn Misfires
If he’s getting bored under house arrest, accused sex offender Dominique Strauss-Kahn can at least look forward to receiving some Hebrew-language reading material. The former head of the International Monetary Fund, who pleaded not guilty yesterday to sexually assaulting a maid in a New York City hotel, was the intended recipient of a package of…
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Books Q&A: A Yiddish Farm Grows in New York
Like a number of young American Jews involved in the “food movement,” a group of about 10 people will gather this summer at an organic farm. They’ll harvest the farm’s bounty, participate in cooking classes, study Jewish texts and form an intentional community. But this group will do it all in Yiddish. The program called…
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Books Welcome To Our Venus-Mars Home!
Lévana Kirschenbaum is the author of the forthcoming “The Whole Foods Kosher Kitchen: Glorious Meals Pure and Simple” (June 22). 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: I came…
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The Chagalls, Joined in a Sketchbook
Bella Chagall, the great love of Marc Chagall, began to write in a small hardcover sketchbook in 1942, the year after the couple arrived in New York. On the first eight pages, she translated Yiddish poetry into French as a means of relating to her past — since both France, which she had just fled,…
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Books A Most Outlandish Awards Ceremony
The Moby Awards are everything that your typical awards ceremony is not: irreverent, un-manicured, efficient, spare, and the best part? Everyone is invited. Whimsically invented to honor the best and worst book trailers — video previews that publishers use to promote their acquisitions — it’s the kind of event that doesn’t necessarily compel its presenters…
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Books V.S. Naipaul Just Doesn’t Understand Jane Austen
Not this again. After the success of “Bridesmaids” seemed to finally sound the death knell for the whole “women can’t be as funny as men” canard, we’re right back to hearing “women can’t write like men.” The culprit this time? Acclaimed novelist V.S. Naipaul, who dissed all women writers, and said none were his match….
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