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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Misery Would Love Some Company
Eden By Yael Hedaya, Translated by Jessica Cohen Metropolitan Books, 496 Pages, $35 In Yael Hedaya’s fiction, everyone — man, woman and child — leads a life of quiet desperation, wherein the usual forms of solace are futile. Love is disappointing. Success brings confusion. Family life is stress inducing. (Invariably in Hedaya’s books, children are…
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Books My Horribly Embarrassing Memo
On Monday, Avi Steinberg wrote about Kafka in Tel Aviv. His first book, “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” was just released. 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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Where Jews Choose To Muse
November’s gala opening of the National Museum of American Jewish History, in Philadelphia, has thrust into public consciousness the centrality of museum-going to the modern Jewish experience. For increasingly large numbers of American Jews, as well as their Christian neighbors, the museum, rather than the synagogue, has become the public face of the American Jewish…
The Latest
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Books Composing Identity, From Jamaica to England
This year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist featured two authors who write about groups not often represented in British literature. Howard Jacobson, author of “The Finkler Question,” has made a career crafting a literary image of the English Jew, while Andrea Levy, shortlisted for “The Long Song,” has documented the black British experience in her five…
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Books Is Yiddish Literature the Next Big Thing?
The Brothers Ashkenazi By I.J. Singer, translated by Joseph Singer Other Press, 432 pages, $16.95 The Magician of Lublin By Isaac Bashevis Singer Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $15 The Glatstein Chronicles By Jacob Glatstein Edited and introduced by Ruth R. Wisse, translated by Maier Deshell and Norbert Guterman Yale University Press, 432 pages,…
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Don’t Trust Your Gut
One of the functions of religion, we are told, is to provide comfort in an uncomfortable world. We all know we will die, but religion comforts us with tales of the afterlife. We all know that life is unpredictable, but religion comforts us with stories of a guiding light, ordering the universe. In this way,…
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Books The Pit of Tel Aviv, A Preliminary Damage Report
Avi Steinberg’s first book, “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” 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 the series, please visit: I was on a roll…
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My Days With Dylan
On Sunday December 5, the event “Bob Dylan and the Band: What Kind of Love is This?” sponsored by the Forward, celebrates one of rock and roll’s most powerful collaborations. A symposium at the 14th St Y — where an exhibition of Dylan memorabilia and photographs by William G. Scheele (a road manager for The…
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Writer and Actress Diane Flacks on How ‘It Gets Better’
Diane Flacks, a Jewish actress and writer, appears in the “It Gets Better Canada,” the country’s LGBT community’s artistic contribution to the anti-bullying campaign. Flacks can be seen in the popular, 12-minute video saying, “In my son’s class, a lot of the kids say, ‘I have two moms!’ and they don’t. But they wish they…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: Conclusion
In celebration of Jewish Book Month, The Arty Semite has partnered 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, Jewish Book Council director Carolyn Starman Hessel concludes…
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Books Pen Pals Reunited: Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt
The friendship between the great kabbalist Gershom Scholem and the political scientist Hannah Arendt famously foundered in the 1960s after a disagreement over Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” an account, of the trial of the Nazi war criminal. Scholem reproached Arendt for a lack of “ahavath Yisrael,” to which Arendt readily concurred that she lacked “ahavath”…
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