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
In New Book, Grave Robbing and Other Stories of Poles’ Complicity
Jan Gross is once again forcing Poland to take a new look at its past. The Polish-American historian, whose previous books generated heated controversy and self-examination, has written a searing new indictment of Polish behavior toward Jews during World War II. “Golden Harvest,” a new book by Gross and his former wife, Irena Grudzinska-Gross, charges…
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Gurion Maccabee Explores the Akedah
The epic account of the “Gurionic War” from debut novelist Adam Levin was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards’ JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for fiction. Levin spoke to the Forward’s Allison Yarrow in November. In this excerpt the protagonist, Gurion, provides his own exegesis of the famous Akedah story whose impact is assessed…
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Dangerous Liaisons: Ofri Cnaani’s ‘The Sota Project’
It sounds like a bad joke: “What do you get if you put a kibbutznik in a stable?” The punch line, however, is anything but bad or, for that matter, a joke. For two years, the kibbutznik in question, Ofri Cnaani, has questioned the Talmud through the lens of contemporary art, and the result has…
The Latest
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Bound for Social Contention
Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative By Yael S. Feldman Stanford University Press, 440 pages, $60 ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” So said William Faulkner in his “Requiem for a Nun.” If proof of this statement is needed, the history of Israel — where events thousands of years old…
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You Don’t Know Zubi!
Zubi!: The Real Hebrew You Were Never Taught in School By Danny Ben Israel, illustrated by Chris Murphy Plume, 160 pages, $13 Israelis barely speak Hebrew. The language on the streets, in cafes and along the beaches is a hybrid of adapted and adopted expressions mined from Arabic, English, Russian, Yiddish and dozens of dialects….
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How To Understand Yeshivish
Browsing on the Internet while working on last week’s column, which had to do with a blessing in the morning prayer, I came across the following: “The lechatchila time for shacharis is neitz. B’dieved, if a person davened from amud hashachar and onwards he is yotzei. In a shas hadchak he may daven from amud…
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As a Woman, Being Reborn
Coming To Life By Joy Ladin Sheep Meadow Press, 102 pages, $15.95 Medieval kabbalists wrote obsessively about language powers that brought the world into existence. Joy — previously known as Jay — Ladin is a contemporary poet whose words are also creating a world. In her case, though, the world in question is Joy’s own:…
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March 04, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward Baron Richard von Arkovy, thought to be a well-heeled Hungarian aristocrat, was arrested at the posh Plaza Hotel on charges that he stole platinum vessels from the Cuban vice consul in New York, Julio S. Jarron. Although the baron reacted badly to his arrest at the hotel, causing somewhat…
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Books Jewish Children’s Ephemera Where You Least Expect Them
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Princeton’s Cotsen Children’s Library is justly celebrated for the range of its holdings, the imaginative reach of its curators and its stimulating conferences, like the one I had the good fortune to attend just the other day, which explored the ephemera — the stuff — of childhood. From its…
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Books ‘Obama’s Secrets’ at the Jerusalem Book Fair
Crossposted from Haaretz The Jerusalem Book Fair may be the only place where you can get from Russia to India via Angola. With a maze of stands representing publishers both local and foreign (this is Angola’s first showing at the biennial convention) you’ll need a GPS to find your way around, or at least a…
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Françoise Giroud, Her Triumphant Career and Personal Torments
To many, Françoise Giroud, born Lea France Gourdji in September 1916 to Turkish-Jewish parents, was an example of a woman who handled power with uncommon grace. Giroud, who died in January 2003 at age 86, served as France’s minister of culture. In 1953, she co-founded the influential political weekly L’Express to advance the agenda of…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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Culture We tried to fix Hallmark’s Hanukkah problem. Here’s the movie we made instead
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Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
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