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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Love Poetry in the Time of Conflict
War & Love / Love & War By Aharon Shabtai Translated by Peter Cole New Directions Books, 175 pages, $15.95 “Keats called it negative capability. I call it a capacity for sustenance — to sustain and be sustained, which is to say, to continue. And to continue means to always make and say something different.”…
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It’s a Bug’s Life
“Metamorphosis,” the new play that was recently on view at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of BAM’s annual Next Wave Festival, belongs to a particularly well-armed strain of contemporary theater. Self-consciously serious, these shows more often than not originate in countries that have deep wells of arts funding, and so they tour for…
The Latest
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Books Short Friday
Earlier this week, Avi Steinberg wrote about Kafka in Tel Aviv and shared a horribly embarrassing memo. His first book, “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” was just released. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
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Anarchic Revolution and Traditional Judaism
Gustav Landauer was born to a Jewish family in 1870, in Karlsruhe, Germany. As did most radicals, he abandoned religion in his youth, however, at the beginning of the 20th century he got interested in pantheistic, neoplatonic and kabbalah-inspired varieties of Christian mysticism. A few years later, he became friends with Martin Buber, and his…
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Books Christmas in America
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Those who, for one reason or another, stand outside the frame of Yuletide cheer often find their voices muted come Christmas. The singing of “Silent Night” leaves us, well, silent. Not so for the protagonist of “The Loudest Voice,” one of the most celebrated of Grace Paley’s many singular…
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The Nigun Project: The Magid of Koznitz’s Nigun
The Magid of Koznitz (1737–1814) was born under miraculous circumstances. His father, an old bookbinder, and his mother were impossibly impoverished villagers in the Ukraine. One Sabbath this pious couple was visited by a stroke of good fortune. The couple, already advanced in years, was so poor that they fasted much of the time, saving…
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December 17, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward When the Jewish community of some far-flung town in the United States needs a rabbi, where does it turn? New York, where else. These towns send committees to interview rabbis and, usually, they get what they’re looking for. Do they want a rabbi with a beard and peyes or…
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Breaded Acts of Love, Luck and Shipwreck
In a November issue of The Boston Globe, language columnist Jan Freeman, taking advantage of the approaching 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible (the KJV first appeared in 1611), wrote about the many biblical expressions there that have become fully naturalized English idioms. Some of these, she observed, we use regularly,…
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Metamorphoses: The Sources and Journeys of a Tune
Listen to a clip from “Di Tsvey Brider” (“The Two Brothers”) from “New Worlds: A Celebration of I.L. Peretz” produced by Folksbiene. From an original score by Dmitri Slepovitch, recorded with the musicians Dmitri Slepovitch, Matt Temkin, and the voices of Shane Baker and Mikhl Baran. ‘A melody lives and dies and it is forgotten,”…
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Misery Would Love Some Company
Eden By Yael Hedaya, Translated by Jessica Cohen Metropolitan Books, 496 Pages, $35 In Yael Hedaya’s fiction, everyone — man, woman and child — leads a life of quiet desperation, wherein the usual forms of solace are futile. Love is disappointing. Success brings confusion. Family life is stress inducing. (Invariably in Hedaya’s books, children are…
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Books My Horribly Embarrassing Memo
On Monday, Avi Steinberg wrote about Kafka in Tel Aviv. His first book, “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” was just released. 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…
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