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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Books
This Storm Is What We Call Progress
Earlier this week, Michael David Lukas shared a list of his top ten favorite Jews of all time and his connection to Nomi Stone. 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,…
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Books Israel and Germany Collaborate on Online Archive
Crossposted from Haaretz Soon you’ll be able to read the personal archives of Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem online. Hundreds of medieval manuscripts, scores of personal archives and many other materials retained at the National Library in Jerusalem will be digitized, as part of a joint project by the Israeli and German governments. The materials…
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Out of Step, and Out of This World
Journal of a UFO Investigator By David Halperin Viking, 294 pages, $25.95 “I sat swaying over the book, poring over its words. I could make out nearly all that the Gypsies had written if I stuck with it long enough. The meaning was something else again. But that’s the way of a scripture: it’s often…
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A Down to Earth Philosophy
Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought By David Biale Princeton University Press, 272 pages, $35 There is a charming Jewish tradition of taking delight in the discovery of the hidden Jewishness of celebrities. This childishly ethnocentric, but perfectly innocuous, enchantment with uncovering the Jewish origins of the famous and fabulous was…
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A Blazing Defense of Individualism
When the brilliant young Italian-Jewish philosopher, poet and artist Carlo Michelstaedter killed himself in 1910 at age 23, he must not have suspected that a century on, he and his works would be internationally celebrated. After initial neglect, a major exhibit, “Carlo Michelstaedter. Far Di Se Stesso Fiamma” (“Carlo Michelstaedter: Transform Yourself Into a Flame”),…
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February 25th, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward “I have decided to make my living on the streets,” 16-year-old Brooklyn resident Julius Perlovitz said to a Manhattan Avenue Court magistrate. Perlovitz was arrested along with a black teenager, 18-year-old Frank Jones, on the charges that the two robbed grocery store owner Isidore Gold of $40. Perlovitz and…
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Art Shir Enjoyment Of Vocal Music
Why should Justin Bieber have all the fun? Instead of the teenage pop sensation chanting “Baby, Baby, Baby,” why not the words “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel,” sung to the same tune? One professional Jewish a cappella group is doing just that. Six13 is part of a growing number of Hebraic harmonizers springing up across America in…
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Books The Stranger’s Notebook
On Monday, Michael David Lukas shared a list of his top 10 favorite Jews of all time. 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: In my last post I…
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Books How to Sacrifice a Lamb and Other Important Information
For many Jews and non-Jews, American Jewish culture is defined by stereotypes such as the pushy mother, the shleppy father, chopped liver swans, too much food (“just in case…”) accountants, doctors, and holidays in the Catskills or Florida. But a new generation of Jews are so hip, Americanized and assimilated that they are not even…
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Lulu’s Back in Town
‘Mlle. God” opens with an aging painter named Melville wooing the sexually liberated Lulu. Annika Marks’s bravura performance channels the almost divine sensuality from Franz Wedekind’s “Lulu” plays and G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film “Pandora’s Box,” upon which Nick Kazan’s new work is loosely based. Unlike those dramas, though, the play’s goal is not simply sensual…
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Mind Your ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’
MEMOIR AND ESSAY By Michael Gottlieb Faux Press, 170 pages $16 Poets of the Language School (aka the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, tendency, faction or sociological phenomena — the occasionally rancorous debate continues) have risen to become the dominant avant-garde of modern American poetics. The first generation (including Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews, Lyn…
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