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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‘Why Is Your Haggadah Different From Others?’
Reporting on the new Haggadot of the year is among my favorite roles here at the Forward. Each year, a new trove appears. And each year, we learn something new about the American Jewish experience. It’s no surprise, then, that the most exciting new Haggadah of the year isn’t a book at all, but an…
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Dalí and the Jews
At the thought of Salvador Dalí, many people envision the artist’s famously eccentric face — his wide, cartoonish eyes and the wiry mustache that seemed to defy gravity. Or perhaps his best-known canvas springs to mind, that all-too-familiar scene of watches melting in a barren landscape. According to a rising crop of scholars, however, there…
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The Passover Cleaning Season Is Upon Us
You know Passover is around the corner when a) you’ve finally finished the last of the chocolate-filled wafers from Purim mishloach manot and b) your friends start kvetching — on Facebook and in person — about the cleaning they have to do. I despise cleaning, and my cleaning lady of several years quit last week…
The Latest
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Books A.B. Yehoshua Speaks His Mind at the New York Public Library
A.B. Yehoshua’s new novel was inspired by a painting of a woman breast-feeding her father. The 74-year-old literary luminary, who has published some 15 books, does not retreat from the provocative or the perverse. Yehoshua calls “Spanish Charity” a probing of the creative process, and Haaretz saw it as a retrospective of the author’s own…
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Out of the Shadow of Pollock, Lee Krasner Defies the World
Lee Krasner: A Biography By Gail Levin William Morrow, 560 pages, $30 In 1956, the artist Jackson Pollock was killed in a car crash in Springs, on the South Fork of Long Island. He was 44 years old and drunk when he drove his Oldsmobile convertible into a tree one fateful August night. He died…
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The Divine Firsts
Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible’s Intriguing Firsts By Meir Shalev, translated by Stuart Schoffman Doubleday Religion, 304 pages, $25 Israeli scholar and poet Zali Gurevitch once asked a room full of kibbutz parents a question he admitted was impossible to answer: If their children were allowed to study only one subject, what would it be?…
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Bloodsuckers, Serbs and Ghostly Kabbalists
Leeches By David Albahari, Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $24 In assessing the work of Serbian-Jewish writer David Albahari, any English-language reader would be working with half a deck. Albahari, who writes in Serbian but has lived in Canada since 1994, has published more than 20 books, including novels, short-story collections,…
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The Optimism of the Will
The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg Edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza Translated by George Shriver Verso Books, 512 pages, 39.95 ‘It’s located on Rosa Luxemburg Straße,” she said, “Two blocks from Alexanderplatz. Just take the train, and I’ll meet you there.” Savoring the combination of literary brand names wrapped into that sentence,…
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There’s Not No Place Like Home
The Free World By David Bezmozgis Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pages, $26 In his appreciation of the film “The Wizard of Oz,” Salman Rushdie wrote, “The real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home,’ but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of…
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April 8, 2011
100 Years Ago in The Forward In relentless rain, nearly half a million people marched silently through the streets of New York City in memory of those who lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Many of those watching from the sidewalks were in tears, as were the marchers. A large number of…
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J’Accepte
April 8 marks the 100th birthday of French-language aphorist Emil Cioran, and the celebrations in Paris include the publication of ‘Cioran: Mystical Short Prayers’ a philosophical appreciation by Stéphane Barsacq from Les Éditions du Seuil. A colloquium, ‘Cioran: Jubilatory Pessimism’ was held at this year’s Paris Book Fair. And on April 7, Les editions CNRS…
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