Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Cultural Materialism
Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America By Ken Koltun-Fromm Indiana University Press, 358 pages, $70 Being an Americanist in a Jewish studies department can be, from time to time, a humbling experience: When your colleague down the hall is educating her students about the Akkadian and Sumerian sources of the Torah or helping them…
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Picture This
Chris Stein, founding member with Debbie Harry of the musical group Blondie, wants to publish a photo book about New York’s punk rock scene. “It will have all the dead people and everything,” Stein said from his home near Woodstock, N.Y. “I have a picture of Anthony Kiedis” — the very much alive lead vocalist…
The Latest
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Rivers Run Through the Bible Lands
Bill Morris writes that he has been “struck by the coincidence” of three rivers that flow partly or wholly through Israel, or along its borders, having names that start with the same syllable: the Jordan, or Yarden in Hebrew; the Yarmuk, an eastward-flowing tributary of the Jordan that joins it south of the Sea of…
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Don’t Throw Away Yemen
Every so often, I’m seized by the compulsion to clean out my overpopulated drawers and closets and to dispose of all the stuff that I’ve accumulated over the years. Usually that compulsion passes quickly, but not this time: I was determined to deaccession. The process, though, was a halting and incomplete one, for no sooner…
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July 16, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Two weeks ago, a woman saw another leave a lot of garbage in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The first woman told the other that she should clean up, and that newspapers had written about how Jews are slobs. After a dispute and no resolution, they left. Later, both picked up…
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Measuring Mahler, in Search of a Jewish Temperament
This article originally appeared in the August 23, 2002 edition of the Forward. We are reprinting it today in honor of the 150th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s birth. As a small ensemble of Viennese musicians, along with his own daughter Andrea, played examples of Jewish folk music and Judenpolkas, Philip Bohlman, associate professor in the…
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A Perennial Wunderkind
Despite his mastery of the weary insomniac tone, Harold Bloom, who turns 80 on July 11, has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, youthful intellectual vigor as master of the intellectual zetz (wallop, in Bloom’s native Yiddish). Born in the East Bronx to an Odessa-born garment worker and a housewife who emigrated from near Brest-Litovsk, Bloom…
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Peoplehood Vs Israel
Peoplehood and support of Israel are two major values of the American Jewish community. But they are in direct conflict, both in principle and in practice. In principle, the values of peoplehood and Israel are on a natural collision course. Peoplehood — the notion that we are all united purely by dint of being members…
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The Kindness of Strangers
The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness By Oren Harman W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 464 pages, $27.95 Ever since Darwin first published “On the Origin of Species,” scientists have struggled to figure out the evolutionary origins of altruism. How can the theory of “survival of the fittest”…
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Southern Comfort
Charleston, S.C., has had a Jewish presence since 1695, and now, a few centuries later, it has introduced a Jewish Culture Festival, which its organizers hope will teach Charleston about its Jews and teach other Jews about the South. It’s a long history. Jews arrived barely 25 years after the British landed and established the…
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By Golly, It’s the Deity Again
Jonah G. Sinowitz writes: “Since I was a young child, I’ve written the word G-d with a hyphen. I still think in terms of G-d, even though everyone around me uses the word Hashem. On the other hand, I have no problem writing ‘god’ with a small ‘g.’ Today, for example, in referring to what…
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