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
Cities of Jewish Success, Crushed
JEWISH BIALYSTOK AND ITS DIASPORA By Rebecca Kobrin Indiana University Press, 380 pages, $24.95 GERMAN CITY, JEWISH MEMORY: THE STORY OF WORMS By Nils Roemer Brandeis University Press, 328 pages, $35 A vast, heartbreaking and, to English readers, inaccessible Yiddish and Hebrew library — of some 1,000 volumes, studded with unique memoirs and rare photographs…
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Reading in Your PJs
This fall, a non-Jewish publisher called Margery Cuyler intends to launch the first four titles of a new Shofar series of children’s books. Although Cuyler isn’t Jewish, she told the Forward that she has always been interested in publishing Judaica. Then she reeled off her debut titles — “The Golem’s Latkes,” “Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah,” “Many…
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Sha Boli, China’s Jewish Translator, Writer and Movie Actor
On a muggy day last year, I biked through Beijing’s gray-brick hutong, backstreet alleyways, beneath a smoggy sky. My front basket ferried a batch of fresh bagels bought from an entrepreneurial expatriate New Yorker. A nosh is the usual price of entry for a chat with Sidney Shapiro, one of Chinese literature’s pre-eminent translators into…
The Latest
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The Age of Idealism, Debunked
WE HAD IT SO GOOD By Linda Grant Scribner, 336 pages, $25 ‘The personal is political” was the political headline for the international feminist movement, and it could just as well be the takeaway phrase of this intriguing new work by British novelist Linda Grant. Chronicling three generations among families, Grant, a former journalist-turned-novelist known…
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Yid Lit: Linda Grant
Forward contributor Jo-Ann Mort speaks to Orange Prize-winning novelist Linda Grant about her new novel, “We Had It So Good.” In it, Grant uses the story of an American Jew in Britain to illuminate how baby boomers’ hippie beginnings actually led them to more traditional professions and lives of conspicuous consumption. Read Jo-Ann Mort’s review…
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Kiev Jewry’s Temporary Triumph Over Adversity
Kiev: Jewish Metropolis. A History, 1859-1914 By Natan M. Meir Indiana University Press, 424 pages, $27.95 Natan Meir’s meticulous new history of Kiev Jewry in the modern period, is an assiduous work of conventional scholarship. Meir provides a thorough, lucid and ultimately heartrending account of the noble successes of Kiev’s Jews in building a solid…
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Four Questions About ‘Nemesis’ Answered
I’ve organized my talk around four questions: 1) How does “Nemesis” fit into the body of Philip Roth’s work? Roth has gone a long way toward answering this question. On the page preceding the title page of “Nemesis,” he lays out a neat Linnaean classification of his many novels. At the top are listed the…
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Revolution by Intent
The Israel Film Festival provides viewers with an opportunity to see the Israel of Israelis by showing the country through a different, more localized lens. These films often delve into issues and circumstances that are uniquely local and attempt to translate them for a universal audience. Last year’s festival showcased journalist Miki Rosenthal’s film “The…
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Paul Simon vs. Bob Dylan, Who’s Greater?
In a recent interview in Rolling Stone magazine Paul Simon remarked that he was miffed by comparisons between him and Bob Dylan: “He’s telling you the truth and making fun of you at the same time. I sound sincere every time. Rock and roll has a lot to do with image. If that’s not your…
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A Reluctant Prophet
Bob Dylan turned 70 on May 24. So what? Well, for one, let’s see you continue to perform two-hour concerts, 100 nights a year, as you’ve been doing practically nonstop for the past quarter century or so, all over the world, keeping things new and fresh while the music industry around you falls apart. Your…
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Woody Allen: Paris, Je t’aime
In his new movie, “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen does what he does best. He creates a character out of a city and adds his signature sleight-of-hand. Think “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” when a handsome leading man steps through a screen to romance a depression-era Mia Farrow, or “Zelig,” when the title character appears…
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