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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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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The Man Who Saved New York
DEALINGS By Felix Rohatyn Simon & Schuster, $27.00, 304 pages His life is, in some ways, a classic tale of a Jewish boy making good. In 1940, at the age of 12, Felix Rohatyn escaped Nazi-occupied France with gold coins hidden in toothpaste tubes. After migrating to the U.S., Rohatyn earned a physics degree and…
The Latest
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A Surreal-ist and a Journal-ist
Adonis: Selected Poems Translated by Khaled Mattawa Yale University Press, part of the Margellos World Republic of Letters, 432 pages, $30 Journal of an Ordinary Grief By Mahmoud Darwish Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi Archipelago Books, 175 pages, $16 Though their styles are distinct, poets Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish are two of the Arab world’s modern…
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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…
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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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