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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Union Square’s High-Concept Sukkahs
On September 19, the finalists of the Sukkah City design competition unveiled their re-imagined sukkahs in New York’s Union Square. Locals and tourists alike rubbed shoulders to get a closer look at the ritual huts, which transformed the downtown park into an architectural showcase. The sukkahs will remain in Union Square through September 20. After…
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Designing a Kosher Sukkah
Most contemporary sukkahs, with their snap-together frames, their plastic tarp walls and their bamboo mat schach, or roofing material, bear little resemblance to the high-concept huts that went up over the weekend in New York’s Union Square. The booths erected in the downtown park — winning entries in the Sukkah City design competition — might…
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Mark Cohen on Seymour Krim
Mark Cohen, editor of “Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim,” explains why Krim has been neglected as a Beat, a writer and a Jew. The Forward’s Arts & Culture editor Dan Friedman talks with Cohen about his forthcoming work on the parody songwriter Allan Sherman, an essay about which is slated…
The Latest
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Books ?Exodus? Redux
Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel?s Founding Story By M.M. Silver Wayne State University Press, 280 pages, $29.95 Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller By Ira Nadel University of Texas Press, 376 pages, $27.95 The 1958 novel ?Exodus? by Leon Uris, and the 1960 blockbuster movie that it inspired, set to…
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Books How (and Why) We Saved Soviet Jewry
When They Come for Us, We?ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle To Save Soviet Jewry By Gal Beckerman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 608 pages, $30 It is easy enough to understand why Gal Beckerman chose the somewhat melodramatic title, ?When They Come for Us, We?ll be Gone,? for his masterful and highly readable history of the…
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Books Background Check On a Nazi Hunter
Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends By Tom Segev Doubleday, 448 pages, $32.50 When I was contributing to Simon Wiesenthal?s obituary in 2005 for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, I learned something that surprised me: The legendary Nazi-hunter didn?t personally hunt down a lot of Nazis. Sure, Wiesenthal helped capture some Nazis and their collaborators, and…
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Books To the End and Back Again
To the End of the Land By David Grossman. Alfred A. Knopf, 582 pages, $27.95 There is a moment in David Grossman?s novel, ?See Under: Love,? when an Israeli son of Holocaust survivors gazes at his own sleeping child and remarks to his beaming wife: ??It?s a good thing he can sleep through all the…
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Books An Actress for The Ages
Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt By Robert Gottlieb Yale University Press, 233 pages, $25 Robert Gottlieb?s biography of Sarah Bernhardt is the first volume in ?Jewish Lives,? a ?major new series? being offered by Yale University Press. But in what sense did this most legendary of actresses live a Jewish life? Her mother was…
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Books Marjorie at Fifty-Five
This fall marks the 55th anniversary of the publication of Herman Wouk?s ?Marjorie Morningstar,? the novel that at its height ? what The Nation called the ?Age of Wouk? ? sold more copies than any American novel since ?Gone With the Wind.? ” photo-credit=”Image by EVELYN ROTZ (9/19/1924 – 9/6/2010) B??H,? BARA SAPIR” src=”https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/675x/center/images/cropped/grandma2-091510-1425715955.jpg”] ?Marjorie,?…
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Books Kosher, By Design
Orthodox by design By Jeremy Stolow University of California Press, 288 pages, $41.95 Despite the much-touted death of the physical book, the Orthodox Jewish publishing industry is booming. Perhaps because of the prohibition against using electricity on holidays or on the Sabbath, the ?ArtScroll revolution? is well under way. ?Orthodox by Design? by Jeremy Stolow…
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September 24, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Residents of Brooklyn?s East New York area have taken sides in the marriage drama of 70-year-old Marcus Ulman and 50-year-old Leah Fleisher. A mutual friend recently introduced the couple, a widower and widow, after Ulman took a shine to Fleisher. Ulman proposed marriage and even offered to throw in…
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