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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Wimpels Made Simple
Sidney Jacobson of Chester, N.J., writes: “My wife recently came into possession of a curious, bannerlike cloth about 8 inches wide and 8 feet long, and with the assistance of two rabbis, we determined that it was called a Wimpel. Yet although it was apparently a presentation made to my wife’s grandfather at his circumcision…
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Love Is Talk
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF PAUL CELAN & ILANA SHMUELI Translated by Susan Gillespie Sheep Meadow Press, 280 pages, $19.95 To honor the lovers’ letters between Paul Celan and Ilana Shmueli, this review is conducted as a written conversation between two of our reviewers who are (married) lovers. Widely considered one of the most important postwar European…
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Books News of the Carrot, Not Pain of the Stick
BREAD TO EAT AND CLOTHES TO WEAR: LETTERS FROM JEWISH MIGRANTS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY By Gur Alroey Wayne State University Press, 256 pages, $29.95 You may think you know why your ancestors made their way to this “Golden Land,” but scholar Gur Alroey’s “Bread To Eat and Clothes To Wear” demonstrates that the…
The Latest
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Being Where He Deserves To Be
Multiple exile was the singular experience of 20th-century Jewish musicians. Fleeing from fascist Europe, Soviet oppression and war, they sought audiences capable of giving them shelter and appreciating their talents. A key example is Vienna-born conductor and composer Georg Tintner, who worked in quasi-obscurity in New Zealand, Australia and Canada until late in life, when…
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The End(s) of Irony
Yael Bartana’s film trilogy “…and Europe Will Be Stunned” turns national representation at the Venice Biennale on its ear. The 40-year-old Bartana, a rising art star, is an Israeli representing Poland, where she is neither a citizen nor resident, thereby breaking the Biennale’s traditional format. The gesture nevertheless is fully in line with the artist’s…
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Books Elaborate Lies With Convincing Details
Evan Fallenberg is the author of “When We Danced on Water: A Novel.” 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: I am probably a writer of fiction (as opposed…
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Her Life Was Saved by Rock ‘n’ Roll
When I was in yeshiva, I had, crammed between my bed and the wall of my cockroach-infested dorm room, an AM/FM radio and cassette player on which I listened to contraband music such as R.E.M., Simon & Garfunkel and Pink Floyd. Say what you will about my taste in those days — though I make…
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Books The Gourmet’s Kids Ate Junk
Earlier this week, Efrat Libfroind wrote about her tribe; cooking and self-improvement; 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,…
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Books Nica Rothschild, the Patron (Saint) of Jazz
NICA’S DREAM: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF THE JAZZ BARONESS David Kastin W. W. Norton, 272 pages, $26.95 Pannonica Rothschild, or “Nica,” as she was called, tried very hard to be an upstanding member of the famous Jewish banking family. She went to the right schools, married the right man (a French baron, no less),…
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Sholem Aleichem in America
Though Sholem Aleichem is widely known for his depictions of Eastern European shtetl life, the famed Yiddish writer spent a number of years living and writing in America. In a new documentary titled “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness,” director Joseph Dorman details the life of Sholem Aleichem, from his early successes to his many,…
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Books My Tribe
Earlier this week, Efrat Libfroind wrote about cooking and self-improvement, being a mother and a full-time pastry chef and 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…
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Fast Forward NYU student draws hate crime charges for flying flag with swastikas, Star of David over campus building
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Yiddish פֿאָרשונגען פֿון וויכטיקע היסטאָריקער אויף ייִדיש — איצט אַרויס אויף ענגלישResearch studies in Yiddish by noted historians, now in English
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Culture In the course of his 104 years, he resisted the Nazis, fought against blood libel and became a towering Jewish intellectual
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Culture That time Allen Ginsberg wrote a Socialist poem — about Bernie Sanders