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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July 8, 2011
100 Years In The Forward Of the numerous strange hobos who populate Manhattan’s Jewish Lower East Side, none, perhaps, is stranger than the man known only as “Moyshe,” who occupies a stoop on Chrystie Street near the corner of Broome. Known as the “mayor” of Chrystie Street, Moyshe sits on his stoop every day of…
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Scant Dishing From a Print Pooh-bah
Lives and Letters By Robert Gottlieb Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $30 There is something poignant in reading a collection like this, one that comprises mainly long, discursive reviews of long, intelligent books about long-dead people. Our author is a notable man of letters, the former editor in chief of both Simon & Schuster…
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It Is Not Over The Sea That You Shall Ask Who Shall Fetch It
Literary Passports: The Making Of Modernist Hebrew Fiction In Europe By Shachar M. Pinsker, Stanford University Press, 504 Pages, $60 American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity In The United States By Michael Weingrad Syracuse University Press, 280 pages, $34.95 Since the 1783 founding of the journal HaMeasef in East Prussia, the Diaspora has been…
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What He Contributed, What He Endured
On May 29, at the Théâtre d’Orléans, a gala concert, Hommage à Jean Zay, paid tribute to a minister of education and fine arts in the 1930s government of French-Jewish socialist Léon Blum, whose lasting impact on French culture is being newly celebrated. Son of a left-wing Jewish newspaper editor in north-central France, Zay was…
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Walk Softly and Carry a Big Shtick
The contemporary American vernacular has dozens of Yiddish words in it, most of which — maven, schlep, kosher, etc., etc. — mean pretty much the same thing in English as they do in Yiddish. Occasionally, though, Yiddish words domesticated in English have taken on new meanings. This is a natural linguistic process, even though to…
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Books Cooking and Self-Improvement
Earlier this week, Efrat Libfroind wrote about being a mother and a full-time pastry chef and being the only kosher cooking student in class. Her new cookbook, “Kosher Elegance: The Art of Cooking With Style” is now available. Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book…
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Books The Kosher Student
On Monday, Efrat Libfroind wrote about being a mother and being a full-time pastry chef. Her new cookbook, “Kosher Elegance: The Art of Cooking With Style” is now available. Her 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…
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Ode to the Righteous Bulgarian Gentiles
When several trains entered Bulgaria secretly on March 8, 1943, to deport 8,000 Jews to Polish concentration camps, the Bulgarian Parliament, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Bulgarian people opposed the anti-Semitic plot so vehemently that Nazi-sympathetic Alexander Belev, chairman of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, had to back down. Other attempts to deport Jews…
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Books Ganache, and Kids
Efrat Libfroind is the author of “Kosher Elegance: The Art of Cooking With Style.” Her 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: Being a full-time mom and also a full…
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Books Google Maps of Jerusalem, Circa 1570
Crossposted from Haaretz Late 16th-century Jerusalem is “the most famous of Judea and the entire East, whose size and splendor marvels the imagination” according to German geographer and theologian George Braun, who during the Renaissance created several of the most important historical maps of the city. “That Jerusalem is the center of the whole world…
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A Modest Proposal
For several decades, opposition to circumcision has been building in the United States and within the American Jewish community. This year, the people of San Francisco will see on their ballots a proposed ordinance banning circumcision entirely, with no exception for religious Jews or Muslims. As others have written in these pages already, this measure…
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