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
Our Rack: Yeshiva Girl YA; Bios of Bernhardt, Alcott
NON-FICTION In “Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt Robert Gottlieb,” Robert Gottlieb trims away the fat from the storied life of the legendary actress, who was born Jewish and who was later baptized a Roman Catholic. Gottlieb presents a peppy and concise biography rooted in facts and recorded accounts. The book, the debut title in…
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What Remains?
Photographer Yuri Dojc and filmmaker Katya Krausova recount their journey to document the last shards of Slovakian Jewry in the video below: The shattering of Jewish glass on November 9, 1938, did more than superficial property damage. As a government-sponsored pogrom at the heart of civilized Europe, it rocked the humanistic foundations of the industrial…
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Disparate Worlds
Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian Avi Steinberg Nan A. Talese. 24.95 Avi Steinberg’s memoir of his time as a prison librarian is a catalog of juxtapositions. The product of a suburban modern Orthodox community and a graduate of Harvard, Steinberg seems an unlikely candidate for a rough Boston prison, where…
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Italian Hilltop Conversion
The Jews of San Nicandro John Davis Yale University Press, 256 pages, $30 In a remote southern Italian town in the 1930s, a group of Catholics who had never before met any Jews began practicing their own idiosyncratic brand of Judaism. Helmed by a disabled and charismatic WWI veteran named Donato Manduzio, who fancied himself…
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Going Up, One More Time, Gentlemen Please
Three distinguished readers have sent me four e-mails concerning my October 15 column on the expression “making aliyah.” All make good points. Let’s start with Noyekh Miller, the redoubtable editor of the Yiddish language website Mendele. He e-mailed me twice. The first time was to say: “You’re right in pointing to the increasing proportion of…
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Harry Houdini: The Art of Assimilation
How to explain the durability of Harry Houdini — subject of a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York? He died more than 80 years ago in Detroit, yet his fame remains undimmed and unabated. Indeed, utter his name to adolescents and — even though they’re unlikely to have seen any of the…
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A Mexican Suitcase Finds Its Context
In 1939, famed war photographer Robert Capa left a suitcase of film negatives in the care of his darkroom manager, Csiki Weiss. Capa, who fled Paris for New York in advance of the German invasion, would never again see the suitcase, which held dozens of rolls of undeveloped film that he and his colleagues, Gerda…
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November 12, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward The first steps have finally been taken!” a Forverts editorial reads. “Socialism has made its entrance into the U.S. Congress. Three representatives, three trustworthy, capable representatives from our party — Comrades Berger and Gaylord from Milwaukee, and Comrade Bachman from Columbus — were elected to the House of Representatives….
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Discovering Kafka and Rabbi Nachman
Arts and culture editor Dan Friedman interviewed award-winning poet and author Rodger Kamenetz, whose new book about his physical and spiritual pilgrimage, “Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka” (Schocken/Nextbook), charts a path between literature and religion. The Arty Semite is now featuring excerpts and reviews from Kamenetz’s Psalm 151 series. Dan Friedman….
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Books Getting Close to Your Food Is Harder When Meat Is Involved
On Monday, Sue Fishkoff wrote about people who only keep kosher on holidays. She is the author of “Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author…
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Books The Meaning of Money
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Many moons ago, when I was a graduate student in Jewish history happily spending my days doing little else but reading, one of the most intriguing books I encountered was not Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed,” or “Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrin” or, for that matter, Hannah Arendt’s “The…
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