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
Remembering How to Be a Jew
Earlier this week, Lavie Tidhar wrote about Jewish vampires and Hebrew punks and searching for Osama. His new novel, “An Occupation of Angels,” is now available. 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…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: Gerard Manley Hopkins
In celebration of Jewish Book Month, The Arty Semite is partnering with the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA) and the Jewish Book Council to present “30 Days, 30 Texts,” a series of reflections by community leaders on the books that influenced their Jewish journeys. Today, Dan Friedman writes about the poetry of Gerard…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’
In celebration of Jewish Book Month, The Arty Semite is partnering with the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA) and the Jewish Book Council to present “30 Days, 30 Texts,” a series of reflections by community leaders on the books that influenced their Jewish journeys. Today, Elise Bernhardt writes about “A Tale of Love…
The Latest
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A ‘Child of Daumier’ Confronts the 1990s
Jack Levine died at his home on Monday, November 8, aged 95. An American Social Realist painter who disliked the expressionism and abstract painting he saw become popular during his lifetime, Levine depicted, with visceral force, the social interactions between people. Often these skewered the powerful, as described in this 1997 profile and studio visit…
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Archive Should Children Play Baseball?
The kids can play, so long as it doesn't get in the way of studying or put them in with a bad crowd
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Coming Out Of Left Field
A new documentary, “Jews and Baseball, an American Love Story,” which opened on November 5 in New York, is a film that largely succeeds at telling the story of a great American people (the Jews, that is) via the tale of a great American pastime. It may not be a grand slam, but it’s at…
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Limits of The Sacred, Limits of Representation
For Allen Grossman, a poet of prodigious gifts and the most recent winner of the prestigious Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, a successful poem does not merely give voice to human experience. It is an expression of human existence itself. Although often noted for its influences from High Modernists like William Butler Yeats and Wallace…
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Rowing Home to Haven In Sunny Palestine
Jacob Wolf writes from Bet Shemesh, Israel: “In your October 17 column about the phrase ‘making aliyah,’ you speak of the ‘mountains of Palestine’ and ‘the Palestinian coast.’ Since ‘Palestine’ was the name given the Land of Israel by the Romans after their destruction of the Temple, and remains a term used by those who…
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The Problem With Liberals
There was a time, in the 1980s and early ’90s, when kitchen-sink realism was so ubiquitous that it seemed this was the only “correct” way to write a play. You place your usually working-class characters around the dining room table, or maybe the living room couch, and let them talk at each other, slowly unveiling…
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A Little Paris Just Outside Warsaw
When art lovers think of the early 20th-century movement known as École de Paris, such Eastern European Jewish superstars as Marc Chagall, Moïse Kisling and Chaïm Soutine come to mind. All these celebrated artists went to France for inspiration, instruction and exaltation. Their contemporaries, however, included dozens of infinitely less famous Jewish artists of real…
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A Rabbinical Saint of the Ledger
At first blush, there’s probably nothing duller than a ledger book in which columns of credits inhabit one side of the page and columns of debits the other. Only someone completely at home within the world of accountancy is capable of unlocking a ledger’s secrets and of discerning a human story where the rest of…
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