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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Books
One-Paragraph Novels
David Albahari is the Serbian-born Canadian author, most recently, of the novel “Leeches.” The book is a feat of magic, an existential philosophical novel that’s also funny and with enough mysteries to keep the reader guessing. It’s also one long paragraph — that’s right, a 300-page-long paragraph. Here, Albahari explains the motive behind his madness….
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A Frothy, Farce Charts a Route to Interracial Peace
There’s definitely something in the water over there in France. In director Michel Leclerc’s new feature film, “The Names of Love” (which should really be named “Make Love, Not War,” but more on that later), stupidity is fetching, assimilation is absurd and all it takes to solve the Arab-Jewish problem is — sex. The part…
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Books Poetic Resources of Jewish Folklore: Three Works by Howard Schwartz
In a recent article in the Jewish Review of Books titled “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia,” Michael Weingrad argued that dark, Gothic fantasy writing does not sit well with the Jewish weltanschauung, and that by and large, we simply do not have that kind of literature. This is because, as Weingrad compellingly puts it,…
The Latest
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Father’s Day
My grandparents’ lake house was the final resting place for household possessions that had been replaced but were too good to throw away. As a result, when we were out there, we ate off unmatched dishes while sitting on unmatched chairs. We slept on ancient sheets beneath heavy quilts that smelled of the must of…
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Books The Tragic Lives and Loves of Joyce’s Russian Translators
June 16 is Bloomsday, the day when Leopold Bloom, the Jewish-descended protagonist of James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” took his quasi-Homeric one-day odyssey through Dublin. It’s the day when Dubliners and Joyce’s fans throughout the world celebrate the legacy of the great Irish novelist, whose protagonist transcends all cultural and temporal borders while remaining both Irish…
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The Erosion of the Holocaust
THE END OF THE HOLOCAUST By Alvin H. Rosenfeld Indiana University Press, 328 pages, $29.95 The impact of the Holocaust on contemporary culture has been enormous; less recognized has been the impact of contemporary culture on what we think of as “the Holocaust.” The main thrust of Alvin Rosenfeld’s “The End of the Holocaust” is…
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Philologos: What’s That On Your Head?
Helen Hill of Miami writes: “My mother, who grew up in a Polish shtetl, used the word perukha in Yiddish to describe a lady’s head covering such as a sheytl or turban. Presumably, this came from perruque, which I believe is French for a wig. But how did French get into shtetl Yiddish?” A sheytl,…
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Avoiding the Siberia of Capitalism, a Life Without Music
You Must Go and Win By Alina Simone Faber and Faber, Inc., 256 pages, $14 I ask for your indulgence while I broadly generalize about young immigrants brought to this country from the former Soviet Union as children, American raised, if not, strictly speaking, eligible for the presidency: There are only two kinds. The first…
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‘Jérusalem’ Arrives Home, Age 164
It’s not often that you arrive for a night at the opera to find protesters waving banners and urging you not to enter. But then again, it’s not often that the Old City of Jerusalem becomes a backdrop for an opera about the emotions of crusaders who came here to conquer. The highlight of the…
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June 24, 2011
100 Years In The Forward Hundreds of furious women from Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side nearly started a riot when Elias Birnbaum attempted to open the vegetable store he owns with his wife. The angry women, who live on the block where the vegetable store is located, were upset with Birnbaum, who recently…
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To Bee or Not To Bee
Getting honey for Rosh Hashanah is the least of your problems. Since 2006, farmers and scientists have been worrying about colony collapse disorder — the name of a mysterious syndrome which has killed 5 million bee colonies and literally billions of bees in North America. This is a big problem, and not just because of…
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