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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Of Schmucks and Schlemiels
Paramount Pictures’ new laugh-out-loud comedy “Dinner for Schmucks” is only the latest in a crop of recent films and novels to idealize not the schmuck, but the schlemiel. Directed by Jay Roach and executive produced by Sacha Baron Cohen — no stranger to the appeal of the schlemiel — “Dinner for Schmucks” is a remake…
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Books An Advertising Pioneer Who Predicted Israel’s Publicity Woes
Today, the name of pioneering advertising executive Albert Lasker is mostly associated with the Lasker Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports medical research. But as a forthcoming biography by Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz points out, Lasker himself was more likely to self-identify as a “propagandist” than as a philanthropist. “The Man Who Sold America:…
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With Fewer Objects but Grander Vision, Israel Museum Opens Anew
After three years and $100 million worth of renovations, the Israel Museum threw open the doors of its renewed campus for an elite opening party July 25 and to the public July 26. The museum, Israel’s largest cultural institution, has suffered in the past from a reputation as inaccessible. Exhibits were dense and difficult to…
The Latest
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Are Corporations Evil?
Kyle: Who are the corporations? Hippie: The corporations run the entire world! And now they’ve fooled you into working for them! — (from “South Park”) Ever since Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority, conservatives in America have used moral issues to convince poor Americans to vote against their economic interests. Thanks largely to convincing working-class…
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Ways To Case the Literati
1. A writer — intelligent, disciplined, not without talent — watches as shysters and hucksters game the literary world, writing fake memoirs, peddling fake personal tragedies. He has mixed feelings about their success. It’s not his, which grates, and they often have more chutzpah than literary ability, which infuriates. But also, he admires their bold…
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A Lively Musical Corpus
Although other composers are most suitably celebrated on the anniversaries of their births (July 7, 2010, marked Gustav Mahler’s 150th birthday), it seems appropriate to fete Mahler, the quintessential creator of funeral marches and meditations on death, on the centenary of his Todestag, May 18, 1911. But in Vienna — the city that sold bonbons,…
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Who Put the Bop in the Bop Shoo Bop Shoo Bop?
Solomon Miller writes from Huntsville, Ala.: ” photo-credit=”Image by WIKI COMMONS” src=”https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/675x/center/images/cropped/wyclifgent-072910-1425717101.jpg”] “I am puzzled by the origin and pronunciation of the English word ‘Sabbath.’ Since it obviously comes from Hebrew shabbat, why isn’t it ‘Shabbath’? And why the ‘th’ at the end of it? Is this an attempt to mimic an aspirated Hebrew ‘t’?…
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The Nigun Project: Sing for Your Life
When I first came across this nigun in a mid-century Lubavitch anthology, the string of eighth notes that make up the first theme immediately suggested to me the beat for this arrangement. It sounded like a hip-hop beat to me. Through the happy collaboration with Dan Wolf and Tommy Shepherd, of the hip-hop collective Felonious,…
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August 6, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Judge Mayer Sulzberger, president of the American Jewish Committee, has finally come to the conclusion that the American government’s immigration officials are not particularly pro-Jewish. This realization is important because the recent expulsions of Jews from Russia means that more of them will hope to come to the United…
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Slapping the Other Cheek
Film director Todd Solondz is known for making his audiences squirm with discomfort, and “Life During Wartime,” released July 23, is no exception. A sequel of sorts to his film “Happiness” (albeit with a different cast), “Life During Wartime” is a mega-mix of angst, pedophilia, awkward puberty and big-time familial dysfunction. But the film is…
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From Suitcase to ‘Suite Française’
The Life of Irène Némirovsky, 1903–1942 By Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, translated by Euan Cameron Alfred A. Knopf, 448 pages, $35 Many recently released novels have been written by authors who are unavailable for interviews, on account of their posthumous status. But even more thrilling than the publication of works by Roberto Bolaño, Ralph…
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