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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Poetry
Goral bound for altar or cliff I’m at the mercy of You and Your lots Kapparos after swinging the briefly orbiting object stops to be eaten or spent realize that things don’t always revolve around you and resolve the universes between you and Him — Yossi Huttler Yossi Huttler is an assistant district attorney in…
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Jews’ Houses Ain’t Castles: They’re Shuls
Chuck Meyer of Ewing, N.J., writes to ask why a Jewish house of worship is known as a synagogue. The word “synagogue” is originally a Greek one first found in the New Testament. It comes from the verb synagein, “to bring together or gather,” and is a translation of the Hebrew bet-k’neset, “a house [or…
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The Sacred and the Profane
There Is No Other Jon Papernick Exile Editions, 184 pages, $17.95 A little girl on a kibbutz is born pregnant and believes that her baby will be the Messiah. A Haitian-Jewish student comes to school on Purim in Muslim garb… with a bomb strapped to his chest. An image of the Virgin Mary appears in…
The Latest
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A Century of Recording and Making History
If you’ve never heard of Ruth Gruber, Bob Richman’s documentary “Ahead of Time: The Extraordinary Journey of Ruth Gruber,” will certainly enlighten you. But it might have been more accurate to subtitle the movie “The Journey of the Extraordinary Ruth Gruber,” because though accurate, the adjective is more apt for the woman who turns 99…
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Turning History’s Detritus Into Gold
Being a pioneering folklorist is no picnic. Even the groundbreaking anthologies “A Treasury of American Folklore” (1944) and “Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery” (1945), both compiled by Benjamin Botkin, met with ferocious resistance from academic folklorists, according to a new study from the University of Oklahoma Press, “America’s Folklorist: B.A. Botkin…
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The Egyptian Plumber and My ‘Eurabia’ Problem
The toilet in my Milan apartment hadn’t worked for weeks. Standing outside the entrance to the bathroom, I listened to the sounds of the plumber applying his tools, speaking in hushed Arabic to his assistant. My wife had let them in while I’d been out walking our dogs. Always indexing the languages spoken in our…
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Wealth and Self-Loathing
Rich Boy By Sharon Pomerantz Twelve, 517 pages, $24.99 The scene comes near the middle of Sharon Pomerantz’s sprawling new book, “Rich Boy,” and one slice of dialogue captures the central tension in this page-turning debut novel. Robert Vishniak, the protagonist, is driving a cab through the dangerous streets of 1970s Manhattan — bearded, depressed,…
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Anti-Semitism 101
The conceit of Randy Cohen’s new play, “The Punishing Blow,” requires a bit of setup. At some point in the past, second-rate college professor Leslie (Seth Duerr) was arrested for what amounts to an overblown case of public drunkenness — specifically, ramming his car into a ginkgo tree and then waking the neighborhood with his…
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If English Was Good Enough for Jesus Christ…
Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible By Robert Alter Princeton University Press, 208 pages, $19.95 We are truly in a “biblical” era. The sheer volume of contemporary work translating, commenting on, interpreting and exegeting the Bible is astounding for what one would think would be a well-worked mine. But for Robert…
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A Cordoban Chord
Michael Hecht writes: “A timely article might be about the implications of the name Cordoba House for the proposed Islamic center at Ground Zero. Is it perhaps intended as the name of the once — and future — capital of Islamic Spain?” ” photo-credit=”Image by WIKI COMMONS” src=”https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/675x/center/images/cropped/mosquecordoba-082510-1425716335.jpg”] By “future capital,” Mr. Hecht is, I…
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September 3, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Paula Lipman, who resides in New York City on Clinton Street and arrived in the United States seven years ago, was brought by ambulance to the mental ward at Bellevue Hospital after falling into a bout of hysteria. Apparently, her husband disappeared six months after their wedding, which was…
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