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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On the northwest side of Chicago, my old Jewish neighborhood may soon live on in infamy
Albany Park was home to Rosenblum's Bookstore, Weinberg's Clothing — and also alleged DC shooter Elias Rodriguez
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Books South Carolina’s Franklin J. Moses: Scalawag, But No Paskudnyak?
A scalawag may be a nogoodnik or even a paskudnyak, but in the subtitle of Benjamin Ginsberg’s brisk, informed “Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag during Radical Reconstruction” from Johns Hopkins University Press, “scalawag” has a more precise historical meaning. Applied after the Civil War to Southern whites who joined political forces with freed…
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Not Drowning But Waving
Painting whimsies for glossy magazines may be no great cultural achievement, but neither is it proof against more profound investigation. Illustrator and designer Maira Kalman is a sterling example of how an artist can do both. A major touring exhibition, “Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World),” is at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art,…
The Latest
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Books Simon Monjack, Husband of the Late Brittany Murphy, Found Dead
Just nine days before his death Sunday night in his Hollywood Hills home, Simon Monjack, 40, who wed the late actress Brittany Murphy in a Jewish ceremony, was making hopeful future plans. The “Factory Girl” producer planned to go on a European vacation with Sharon Murphy, Brittany’s mother. The two had become core pillars of…
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A Trip to Our Motherwell, Ferber and Gottlieb
When church groups go on field trips, do they heckle the bus driver? “NO! WRONG WAY!” Kvetched the back of the Congregation B’nai Israel (CBI) bus, when the driver went towards I-78 not down Vauxhall but, inexplicably, down Valley. My brother, and many other ex-Millburn N.J. New Yorkers, met us at the museum. The Congregation…
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Mr. Cahan’s Neighborhood
Republished together by Dover in 1970, Cahan’s 1896 novella “Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto” and his 1898 collection, “The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto,” are not “Dubliners.” Cahan overwrites. In fact, he is guilty of crossing the street — crossing the street and jumping on a trolley…
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Memento Mori: Jewish Spirituality and the Sanctification of the World
Earth’s crammed with Heaven And every common bush afire with God — Elizabeth Barrett Browning Western religion can, at times, devalue the world. With eyes turned toward heaven, or the afterlife, it can ignore or denigrate the manifest world, criticizing those who love it too much as “pagan” or, in our time, “humanist.” This is…
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Wonder of Wonders
Crown of Aleppo: The Mystery of the Oldest Hebrew Bible Codex By Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider Jewish Publication Society of America, 220 pages, $40 There is something profoundly alluring about the manuscripts of great literary works. Whether the handwritten fair copy of “Ode to a Nightingale” or a stray page of Shakespeare, Kafka’s diary…
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Talking for Weeks, in Tongues
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it…
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Art Jews Have Been Magic for Thousands of Years
We all believe in magic. Despite 300 years of industrial and social revolution, as well as unparalleled explanation of the natural world through the scientific method, we still throw salt over our shoulders, put up hamsas in our homes, wear lucky shirts to job interviews and run through tested game-day rituals, whether we are playing…
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Two Poems by Jacqueline Osherow
Love Song to That Performance Poet, My Mother Mom! Guess what? I didn’t inherit nothing — Okay, so maybe I didn’t get your face, your generosity, your perfect kindness. That was you in my kitchen this very morning when Magda refused breakfast (a tad rudely) and I offered her a nice glass of grapefruit juice…
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May 28, 2010
100 Years Ago in The Forward Dora Neigerman caught a burglar in her third-floor Delancey Street apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the middle of the night. Unable to scare him off, Neigerman began to fight with him, smashing him over the head numerous times with a brass spittoon. Though stunned, the burglar continued…
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