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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Truth and Lies: A Q&A With Montreal Film Producer Harry Gulkin
In 1976, the Montreal-made film “Lies My Father Told Me” became the first — and, to date, the only — Canadian movie to win the Golden Globe Award for best foreign film, beating out Ingmar Bergman’s “The Magic Flute,” among other nominees. The movie takes place in the mid-1920s and depicts the relationship between a…
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In Search of ‘Lies My Father Told Me’
Sometimes, a movie strikes us just right and we carry it with us through life. For me, it was a movie’s opening scene, with a horse-driven carriage making its way through the back alleyways of Montreal. Running after the wagon is a young boy looking for his grandfather, crying out “Zayde!” In the background, we…
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Books ‘Catcher in the Rye’ Sequel Banned in U.S.
A phony. That’s what the estate of J.D. Salinger is calling Frederik Colting, the Swedish novelist who’s created a sequel to Salinger’s beloved 1951 magnum opus, “Catcher in the Rye.” The BBC reports that Colting’s “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” which depicts “Catcher” protagonist Holden Caulfield as a haunted septuagenarian, has been banned…
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January 21, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward Our Gallery of Disappeared Men features photographs and descriptions of men who have abandoned their wives and families, often leaving them with nothing. The purpose behind the feature is to find the men and force them to pay some kind of restitution to their families. But now the Forverts…
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Art Whithersoever Thou Goest… Even to China
Beijing (formerly Peking) opera is not like anything else. Certainly it?s not like Western opera, except to the extent that both art forms have singers act out stories. To an untrained Western ear, the women?s voices in Chinese opera can resemble nothing so much as the mewing of cats, as cats and female singers of…
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Books In the Shadow of a Saint
In her final days, in the last letter she sent home, Simone Weil reassured her parents: “You have another source of comfort.” She was referring to her niece, Sylvie Weil. Sylvie — with her myopia, pale complexion and dark, cropped hair — bears an unnerving resemblance to her aunt, and has spent her life battling…
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Tell Me About Your Childhood, Mr. Mahler
The Forward speaks with Percy Adlon, director of ?Mahler on the Couch:? ?Mahler on the Couch,? a lush fictionalization of a 1910 meeting between composer Gustav Mahler and psychologist Sigmund Freud, opens the New York Jewish Film Festival on January 12. The film, from German father-and-son filmmakers Percy and Felix Adlon, is mostly fiction: Only…
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Books Is Buchenwald Survivor’s Israel Criticism ‘Abnormal’?
According to the Israeli government, the 93-year-old Buchenwald survivor is a liar. Decried by French embassy spokesperson Yaron Gamburg for spreading falsehoods about the Jewish state, Stéphane Hessel’s criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians apparently does not correspond with reality. “It is a literary fad which will have no affect on the real world,…
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Blue Jew, Gray Jew
Jews and the Civil War: A Reader Edited by Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn NYU Press, 448 pages, $45 Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag During Radical Reconstruction By Benjamin Ginsberg Johns Hopkins University Press, 240 pages, $50 This coming April marks 150 years since the outbreak of the American Civil War. The…
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Books Old and Grey and Only in the Way
Earlier this week, Michael Wex, author of “The Frumkiss Family Business,” wrote about writing about intermarriage and being the kvetch guy. 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…
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Living the American Ethos
Commissioned to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the American Jewish Archives and the 10th anniversary of Gary Zola as the AJA’s current executive director, “New Essays in American Jewish History” is testimony to the variety — and vitality — of scholarship in Jewish Studies. Like Jacob Rader Marcus, the eminent historian who…
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