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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Out of the Shadow of Pollock, Lee Krasner Defies the World
Lee Krasner: A Biography By Gail Levin William Morrow, 560 pages, $30 In 1956, the artist Jackson Pollock was killed in a car crash in Springs, on the South Fork of Long Island. He was 44 years old and drunk when he drove his Oldsmobile convertible into a tree one fateful August night. He died…
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The Divine Firsts
Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible’s Intriguing Firsts By Meir Shalev, translated by Stuart Schoffman Doubleday Religion, 304 pages, $25 Israeli scholar and poet Zali Gurevitch once asked a room full of kibbutz parents a question he admitted was impossible to answer: If their children were allowed to study only one subject, what would it be?…
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Bloodsuckers, Serbs and Ghostly Kabbalists
Leeches By David Albahari, Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $24 In assessing the work of Serbian-Jewish writer David Albahari, any English-language reader would be working with half a deck. Albahari, who writes in Serbian but has lived in Canada since 1994, has published more than 20 books, including novels, short-story collections,…
The Latest
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The Optimism of the Will
The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg Edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza Translated by George Shriver Verso Books, 512 pages, 39.95 ‘It’s located on Rosa Luxemburg Straße,” she said, “Two blocks from Alexanderplatz. Just take the train, and I’ll meet you there.” Savoring the combination of literary brand names wrapped into that sentence,…
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There’s Not No Place Like Home
The Free World By David Bezmozgis Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pages, $26 In his appreciation of the film “The Wizard of Oz,” Salman Rushdie wrote, “The real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home,’ but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of…
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April 8, 2011
100 Years Ago in The Forward In relentless rain, nearly half a million people marched silently through the streets of New York City in memory of those who lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Many of those watching from the sidewalks were in tears, as were the marchers. A large number of…
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J’Accepte
April 8 marks the 100th birthday of French-language aphorist Emil Cioran, and the celebrations in Paris include the publication of ‘Cioran: Mystical Short Prayers’ a philosophical appreciation by Stéphane Barsacq from Les Éditions du Seuil. A colloquium, ‘Cioran: Jubilatory Pessimism’ was held at this year’s Paris Book Fair. And on April 7, Les editions CNRS…
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Books New Life for the American Jewish Year Book?
“It’s a shanda (outrage)!” exclaimed Bruce A. Phillips of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles Campus. He was reacting to the cessation of the American Jewish Year Book after a successful run of more than a century by the American Jewish Committee. The Yearbook — a handy compendium of demographic and historical trends,…
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Holocaust Images by Soviet Jewish Photographers
University of Colorado professor David Shneer has come out with a new book, ?Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust,? in which he introduces readers to a group of Jewish photographers whose names might be new to people in the West. These are Soviet Jews who, remarkably, took some of the most compelling…
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Books The Last Great Yiddish Modernist Poet
The Yiddish poet Yirmiye (Jeremiah) Hesheles died on October 16, 2010. When he celebrated his 100th birthday a group of dedicated Yiddishists, myself included, celebrated the occasion by paying him a visit at the New York State Veterans Home in St. Albans, Queens. A herd of geese, as if out of an Eastern European legend,…
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A Jew by Choice: Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011
Whereas Judaism, unlike some other religions, discourages conversions, there has always been a certain amount of giddy excitement when a star, from Marilyn Monroe to Sammy Davis Jr., converts to the Jewish faith. Few, if any, such conversions, however, made the lasting impact of the ceremony at Hollywood’s Temple Israel on March 27, 1959, at…
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