Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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December 31, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Two teenage boys, Louis Goldstein and Max Bernstein, are being held on $2,000 bail after being arrested for seducing two teenage girls from Brooklyn and holding them against their will. Goldstein and Bernstein allegedly approached the girls, Anna Fastor and Eva Blistein, in a movie theater on Graham Avenue,…
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Chasamba! Chasamba! Chasamba!
‘Chasamba! Chasamba! Chasamba!” This battle cry of the fictional patriotic youth group Chasamba (an acronym for “absolutely secret group”) — familiar to every Israeli child during the first decades of the state — is once again heard across the land. Resurrected from a series of novels to feature in the television show “Chasamba Generation 3,”…
The Latest
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True Drama
Large theaters in 2010 seemed to mostly recycle earlier images of Jews, familiarly corrosive or sentimental (“Angels in America,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Collected Stories,” even “The Merchant of Venice”). It was left to smaller theaters to take fresh approaches to modern Jewish life and recent history. David Greenspan portrayed hilarious and hair-raising marital discord in…
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All Quiet on Eastern Front
Virginia Gross Levin writes from Broomall, Pa.: “Are you familiar with a Yiddish expression greynetz mentshn “border people”? My great uncle used it to describe our family’s secretive nature. In the 50 years since then, I have never heard it from anyone else. I understand that people on the border had to learn to hold…
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I Am Woman, Hear Me Sing
A better answer might have dismissed the rabbinic exegesis that led to the prohibition, in favor of the simple verse itself: “Let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet and your face is beautiful.” In the past year, those sweet voices seem to have multiplied, producing a soundscape full of strikingly talented Jewish…
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Books Let There Be Kvetch!
Ken Krimstein is the author of “Kvetch As Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons.” His 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: Ken Krimstein’s new book “Kvetch As Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons,”…
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Lies and Provocation
A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction By Ruth Franklin Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $29.95 Theodor Adorno famously declared that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” — and indeed impossible. Ruth Franklin, in her thoughtful work of literary history and analysis, “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction,”…
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Alan Dershowitz Rewrites the Future
The Trials of Zion By Alan M. Dershowitz Grand Central Publishing, 352 pages, $26.99 Alan Dershowitz dedicates “The Trials of Zion” to the memory of his mother, who, he tells us, “always encouraged and defended me. She would have liked this book.” A reader would have to possess a heart of stone not to appreciate…
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December 24, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward There’s nothing sadder than a Jewish kid at Christmas. It’s even more difficult in America, where the barriers between Jews and others are not as big. But there is a cure for what ails the Jewish child. It’s Hanukkah! Does this holiday not fall around the same time as…
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Not Just a Friend of Gauguin
Despite my voraciously Jewish eye, checking out museums in France’s Brittany for interesting exhibitions wasn’t likely to yield anything of Jewish Interest. “Brittany and Jews” seemed a stretch — maybe like “the elephant and the Jewish problem.” What I knew of art in Brittany was exemplified in the hard-bitten sensibility of the three unidentified women…
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What? Is There Something in the Water?
Henry Lerner writes from Edison, N.J.: “I was recently struck by the following, which I find perplexing. It seems that in many languages, the word for ‘water’ contains in it the word for ‘what.’ Besides English ‘water’ and ‘what,’ for example, we have German wasser and was, Latin aqua and qua, Hebrew mayim and ma,…
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