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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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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Music for Murder
Few movie soundtrack composers are perennially contemporary household names, but New York-born Jewish musician Bernard Herrmann, whose June 29 centenary is being celebrated with a year of CD releases and live concerts from Minnesota to Bristol, England, is a noteworthy exception. Herrmann’s name is immortally linked to the oppressively ominous, churningy fear-inducing music he wrote…
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Books Para Español, Oprima el Dos!
Earlier this week, Lévana Kirschenbaum blogged about domestic disputes and gourmet food and Spanish chocolate-chip cookies. 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: As a language enthusiast, I have…
The Latest
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Building a Collective Consciousness on a National Scale
French-Jewish historian and publisher Pierre Nora is renowned for editing the monumental series of volumes “Lieux de Mémoire” for the French publisher Gallimard. Literally, the title means, “Places of Memory,” and the series is the ultimate repository of modern Gallic concepts of national identity. Its brilliant scholarship was recognized by Columbia University Press, which, from…
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June 17, 2011
100 Years Ago In The Forward When Brooklyn resident Lina Schwartz, opened her door in the middle of the night to find Michael Sanducci asking where he could find her daughter, Tessie, she angrily told him what she had said many times before: “Leave my daughter alone.” But Sanducci refused to leave and Schwartz pushed…
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Tracing Holland’s Forgotten Kindertransport
Miriam Keesing has hundreds of children. The lucky ones are in their 80s, living in countries across the world as disparate as Holland, America, Argentina and Australia. The unfortunate ones died young, mostly in Auschwitz or Sobibor. Though Keesing’s children come from various parts of Germany and Austria, what unites them is that they were…
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Hank Greenberg, Reluctant Jewish Hero
Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want To Be One By Mark Kurlansky Yale University Press, 192 pages, $25 If America truly is in decline, then some of us would ascribe that decline to the cultural euthanasia that made football and basketball more popular than baseball. For my generation of urban children of immigrant Jews,…
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Anxieties About Moving to Suburbia
Americans are on the move, in retreat from rising floodwaters, mounting mortgages and economic uncertainty. It’s gotten so that we’re hard-pressed to remember a time when the nation’s citizenry relocated from place to place volitionally, on its own steam, a time when mobility tracked upward rather than sideways or backward. I’m prompted to think, and…
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The Language Bibi and Bam Used
“On the Same Page?” asked a front-page caption of the June 3 edition of the Forward, beneath which were parallel excerpts from President Barack Obama’s May 19 speech on U.S. policy in the Middle East and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s May 24 Congressional address. The second pair of matching quotes had the U.S. president saying:…
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Beneath Black Hats and Shtreimels
It used to be that if you saw a Hasid in a movie or a TV show, he (and it was nearly always a “he”) was there as a visual signifier of urban diversity and little more. Hasidim appeared only in crowd scenes, or in montages intent on showing the multicultural essence of the American…
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Books Hungarian Modernist László Krasznahorkai’s Inner Animal
For almost a decade now, [New Directions Publishing][1] has doggedly been bringing the late, late Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai’s novels of impassioned decrepitude and finely cadenced apocalypticism into English. Next year will see the much-anticipated translation of his “Satantango.” To tide us over until then we now have the publication in the Cahiers Writing and…
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