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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Books The Beaten Cannoneer
Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim Edited and with an introduction by Mark Cohen Foreword by Dan Wakefield Syracuse University Press, 296 pages, $29.95 Literary criticism is literature that discusses other literature, situating whatever book or poem historically, while at the same time, relating the literary work to the extraliterary: to…
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Books A Murder Mystery In Little Palestine Brings Middle East to America
The fourth assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery By Matt Beynon Rees Soho Crime, 336 pages, $24 When Omar Yussef arrives in Little Palestine – the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, neighborhood populated by Palestinian-Americans — the aging schoolteacher first finds a headless dead body in his son’s apartment, then watches his son get arrested by an overzealous…
The Latest
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Books ‘Perfidious Albion’
Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England By Anthony Julius Oxford University Press, 864 pages, $45 A monumental study of English antisemitism proves an astonishing and controversial achievement. If nothing else, “Trials of the Diaspora” is an extraordinary testament to the brilliance of its author. That Anthony Julius, a top London lawyer…
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Books A 21st-Century Schlemiel
The Ask By Sam Lipsyte Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $25 He is the anti-hero of the American Jewish novel: bright, only not bright enough; more dreamy than driven, and possessed by insatiable, often misappropriated desires. He does not see himself as beholden to his Jewishness, but neither can he escape it. He was…
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Don’t Talk to the Hand
Leon Kass writes: “Perhaps you can help me with the origin of the Yiddish expression redn tsu der vant, to talk to the wall. Many languages may have such an expression to indicate the futility of efforts to persuade by speech or to gain a hearing for one’s thoughts. But given what became the secularist…
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Jews and Animals, A Very Modern Story
I’m not a big one for animals. I never had a pet when I was growing up, not even a goldfish or a turtle, let alone a dog or a cat. But thoughts of these creatures now fill my head. It’s not that I want one — I don’t — but that I’ve come belatedly…
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Getting Sick of Sondheim?
‘But who needs Albert Schweitzer/When the lights are low?” (“Follies”) “Perpetual sunset is/Rather an unsettling thing.” (“A Little Night Music”) Who else but masterful Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, who turns 80 on March 22, would have found those rhymes? It’s only fitting that all-star celebrations should be plentiful, like the New York Philharmonic’s…
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We Will Not Stop Dancing
Last August a gunman entered the Aguda building in Tel Aviv and opened fire on the crowd at Bar Noar, a safe space for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth. He killed two and wounded a number of others before escaping without trace or identification. Two of the wounded, 15-year-old “Alef” and 19-year-old “Yud” (names…
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March 12, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward The saga of the four Jewish bakers who were attacked recently by anti-union thugs outside Messing’s Bakery on Allen Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side continues. Their hearing took place in Essex Market Court before Judge Corrigan, and the magistrate released the thugs on bail after calling for another…
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Obsessively Self-Filming His Vicissitudes
In February 2006, Israeli documentary filmmaker Tomer Heymann traveled to Berlin to present his film, “Paper Dolls,” at the Berlin International Film Festival. One evening, he went in pursuit of the nightlife for which the city is justly famous, and met Andreas Merk, a German choreographer, at the electronic music mecca, Berghain. What started as…
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Backward: A Video
[ ![][2]][2] In the spirit of Purim, Forward staffers set out to learn what New Yorkers knew about Jews. Produced and edited by Allison Gaudet Yarrow []: https://forward.com/backward-purim/
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