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
Forward Fives: 2010 in Fiction
In this, the second annual Forward Fives selection, we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in film, music, theater, exhibitions and books. Here we present five of the most important Jewish novels of 2010. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. It’s been…
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Books The Genesis of a Cartoon
Ken Krimstein is the author of “Kvetch As Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons.” In his previous posts he wrote about how to be a Jewish cartoonist, making it as a professional and kvetching and wining. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish…
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Books Jewish Gag Cartoonists
Ken Krimstein is the author of “Kvetch As Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons.” In his previous posts he wrote about making it as a Jewish cartoonist and kvetching and wining. 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…
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Books Kvetch and Wine
Ken Krimstein is the author of “Kvetch As Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons.” In his last post he wrote about making it as a Jewish cartoonist. 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…
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December 31, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Two teenage boys, Louis Goldstein and Max Bernstein, are being held on $2,000 bail after being arrested for seducing two teenage girls from Brooklyn and holding them against their will. Goldstein and Bernstein allegedly approached the girls, Anna Fastor and Eva Blistein, in a movie theater on Graham Avenue,…
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Chasamba! Chasamba! Chasamba!
‘Chasamba! Chasamba! Chasamba!” This battle cry of the fictional patriotic youth group Chasamba (an acronym for “absolutely secret group”) — familiar to every Israeli child during the first decades of the state — is once again heard across the land. Resurrected from a series of novels to feature in the television show “Chasamba Generation 3,”…
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True Drama
Large theaters in 2010 seemed to mostly recycle earlier images of Jews, familiarly corrosive or sentimental (“Angels in America,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Collected Stories,” even “The Merchant of Venice”). It was left to smaller theaters to take fresh approaches to modern Jewish life and recent history. David Greenspan portrayed hilarious and hair-raising marital discord in…
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All Quiet on Eastern Front
Virginia Gross Levin writes from Broomall, Pa.: “Are you familiar with a Yiddish expression greynetz mentshn “border people”? My great uncle used it to describe our family’s secretive nature. In the 50 years since then, I have never heard it from anyone else. I understand that people on the border had to learn to hold…
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I Am Woman, Hear Me Sing
A better answer might have dismissed the rabbinic exegesis that led to the prohibition, in favor of the simple verse itself: “Let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet and your face is beautiful.” In the past year, those sweet voices seem to have multiplied, producing a soundscape full of strikingly talented Jewish…
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Books Let There Be Kvetch!
Ken Krimstein is the author of “Kvetch As Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons.” 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: Ken Krimstein’s new book “Kvetch As Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons,”…
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Lies and Provocation
A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction By Ruth Franklin Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $29.95 Theodor Adorno famously declared that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” — and indeed impossible. Ruth Franklin, in her thoughtful work of literary history and analysis, “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction,”…
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