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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Yom Kippur: The Fast of All Fasts
‘On Rosh Hashanah all shall be inscribed and on the day of the fast of Kippur all shall be sealed,” the High Holy Day prayer book says. “The day [yom] of the fast of Kippur,” yom tsom kippur, rather than “the fast of Yom Kippur,” tsom yom kippur, is an expression found in ancient rabbinic…
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How Modern Orthodoxy Flourished On Campus
The Greening of American Orthodox Judaism: Yavneh in the 1960s By Benny Kraut Hebrew Union College Press, 200 pages, $35 One of the great stories of American Jewish life, the Orthodox resurgence of the 1950s and ’60s, has been told and retold by historians, sociologists and novelists. Almost unknown, however, is the narrative of the…
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Fictionalizing the Holocaust
The Emperor of Lies By Steve Sem-Sandberg Translated by Sarah Death Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 664 pages, $30 Theodor Adorno famously wrote that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What, then, would he make of adaptations of the Holocaust itself — films and books that dramatize Jewish suffering during World War II? Sure…
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Essays Examine Primo Levi’s Humanism
Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism After the Fall Stanislao Pugliese, Editor Fordham University Press, 224 pages, $65 Mass deportation of European Jews to the killing metropolis of Auschwitz began in spring of 1942. By January of 1945, more than a million Jews had been murdered there by gas, torture, starvation, medical experimentation and…
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China’s Expert on Kabbalah and Jewish Literature
Ying Han was born in 1973 in Xi’an, the ancient capital of China where both of her parents served in the air force. When Ying was 7 months old, she was sent to her aunt’s home in a poor rural village in Hebei province. Ying remembers a struggle to live, where even white flour was…
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A Graphic Novel for Kids About Graphic Novelist
Lily Renee, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer By Trina Robbins, Illustrated by Anne Timmons and Mo Oh Graphic Universe, 96 pages, $7.95 A Graphic Review of the Book, by Miriam Katin:
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Books More Moses Than Job
A version of this article appeared in Yiddish, here. ‘I am to be read not from left to right, but in Jewish: from right to left’: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky. By Marat Grinberg Academic Studies Press, 400 pages, $65 In the poem “Dream,” Boris Slutsky laconically summed up two defining facts of his generation:…
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Family History Seen Through Tenement Rooms
The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set On A Thousand Square Feet of The Lower East Side By Katharine Greider Public Affairs, 352 pages, $27 By the beginning of the 20th century, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was the most crowded neighborhood on earth, more densely populated than Calcutta. At the Tenement Museum on…
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Bride Shipped from Shtetl to South Dakota
The Little Bride: A Novel By Anna Solomon Riverhead Books, 320 pages, $15 In her classic 1912 memoir of immigration to the United States, “The Promised Land,” Mary Antin notes: “A long girlhood, a free choice in marriage, and a brimful of womanhood are the precious rights of an American woman.” Tell that to Minna…
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Looking Back: October 7
100 Years Ago in the Forward As 25-year-old Bronx resident Flora Kirsch was walking her 3-year-old son, Aaron, to the store, 35-year-old Jacob Spielman accosted her and began yelling at her. As she walked away, Spielman drew a revolver and began running toward her. Bystanders screamed for her to take cover, but her frightened boy…
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When the Ram’s Horn Sounds
Originally published in the Forward September 6, 2002. To adapt the famous categorization of Claude Levi-Strauss, if such wind instruments as clarinets and cornets are “cooked,” the shofar is definitely “raw.” The question arises: Why has this wild horn, the only biblical instrument still in use, come to represent so much to Jews, especially in…
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