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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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Israel’s Postmodern Flash Fiction
Blue Has No South By Alex Epstein; Translated from the Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay Clockroot Books, 131 pages, $15 Miniature Metaphors of an Airport Longings are more a story than a word. (Though I have never managed to write a story about the airport where I heard Hebrew for the first time in my…
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Finding Rabbis and Wandering Jews
In the 19th century, realist authors like Emile Zola and Anatole France were widely worshipped, but literary Symbolism, with its rejection of everyday realism, and prizing of spirituality, also attracted many European Jewish writers. Particularly in France, there appeared a wave of Jewish Symbolists who had social and political activism that was allied with dreamlike…
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Whither Orthodoxy?
Two April conferences in Jerusalem illustrated both sides of the coin of Orthodoxy in Israel, indeed Orthodoxy worldwide. One, the much heralded “The Future of Modern Orthodoxy: Imagine the Future. Join the Conversation,” under the auspices of a National Religious Party spin-off, “Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah,” was held April 1 in Jerusalem and was predictably passionate…
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Putting The High In High School
The November Criminals By Sam Munson Doubleday, 272 pages, $24.95 When you’re a teenager, there’s a sense that life is both as real and consequential as it’s ever going to get and, at the same time, that it’s just a rehearsal for something bigger. In Sam Munson’s debut novel, “The November Criminals,” this helps explain…
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Almost Blue: Israel’s New Borges
Russian-born Israeli author Alex Epstein, 39, hunches forward across the table at the bar. He brushes his long hair out of his face. He scratches his beard. He adjusts his glasses. Epstein’s nervous hands want a cigarette. But at this upscale Denver bar, smoking is off-limits. He has to make do with a glass of…
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Mapping the World at Your Dinner Table
Adam Gladstone writes: “The Hebrew word for tablecloth is mapa. This sounds a lot like the English word map, which according to my dictionary is derived from Latin mappa mundi, that is, ‘a sheet of the world.’ Is it possible that Hebrew mapa derives from the Latin word for sheet?” Possible? Definitely — but this…
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May 7, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward After having been arrested for trying to sell two women to officers from the District Attorney’s Office, Harry Levinson, a pimp on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is spilling his guts in order to avoid jail time. According to the DA, Levinson has informed the officers that there are three…
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Tribeca Offers Jewish Style and Substance
Now in its ninth year, the Tribeca Film Festival, running from April 23 to May 2, has become an East Coast magnet for internationally diverse films and filmmaking — but this year’s Tribeca could be mistaken for a Jewish film festival. An inordinate number of the chosen films deal, in one way or another, with…
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Hang On, Soupy
The other night, over dinner, I mentioned to a friend that I had to get home early to watch a documentary about Soupy Sales. My friend had no idea whom I was talking about, which made me feel a little sad. I guess I had believed that Sales was a timeless figure, a goofy, cultural…
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Books The Apotheosis of Treyf
Although indisputably treyf, ham is sometimes addressed humorously, as in spoofs from the satirical “Onion” or “A Jew Touches Ham,” a new micro-short film by Jewish comedian Aaron Glaser. Then there is “faux ham” proffered by PETA or an ostensibly kosher “Christmas Ham-flavored soda” manufactured in Seattle a few seasons back. Decades ago, scientists unsuccessfully…
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Germany: A 3G Love Story
In America we know the poignant narratives of the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but we are less familiar with the generation of Germans whose forebears were Nazi sympathizers or turned their eyes away from the atrocities of the camps and gas chambers. Photographer Adam Golfer aims to change this. First on a fellowship…
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