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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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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Connecting Disparate Worlds
Arye Carmon, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute, think tank, has been taking photographs for more than 40 years. Only recently, though, has he received recognition for his artwork. Arye Carmon recently visited the Forward’s studio to discuss the recent exhibition of his work at the Max Lang gallery in New York City.
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What Religious Arguments Are Really About
‘All of a sudden, there was hope in my heart I’d see my father again.” Thus wrote one of America’s most influential religious leaders of the moment when he became religious. It was at his father’s funeral, and the presiding minister had just said that death is not the end, that there is an afterlife….
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A Rich Eastern European Dish
The Jews in Poland and Russia: Volume I, 1350-1881 By Antony Polonsky The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 568 pages, $59.50 The academic world has become, as of late, almost grotesquely distended by piles of books and articles on the narrowest and most obscure of subjects, written in increasingly opaque scholarly jargon. A mere glance…
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21st Century Mann
The Escape By Adam Thirlwell Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $25 ‘No one likes a deserter, an escapee, because it proves the fact that there is always a choice. So often, it is easier to believe that life is a trap.” So asserts the wily and knowing narrator of Adam Thirlwell’s at once brilliant…
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A Life of Breath
At the start of Ruedi Gerber’s documentary film, “Breath Made Visible,” a dancer moves onstage with the supple grace of a cat. She takes off an outer garment to reveal legs that, under other circumstances, would draw the eyes and wolf-whistles of construction workers. Fluidly, she takes off her gloves and then her mask. And…
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The Method Man
It helps if Catherine Deneuve likes you. When I spoke to him in his studio, Leonard Lopate — celebrating 25 years at WNYC this year — noted how helpful it was for his journey from art student to radio host, to win the approval of French film stars: Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Jeanne Moreau, and others….
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A Thrill From Beyond the Grave
Love and its crushing disappointments are at the center of Hanoch Levin’s newly discovered play, “Thrill My Heart,” “Hartiti et Leebee” in Hebrew, running now at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv. The play, written by Israel’s most renowned playwright, was discovered shortly after Levin’s death in 1999 and caused a stir of excitement and…
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Of Fags, Flags, Faggots and Feygeles
David Herszenson of Manhattan writes: “I know that feygele literally means ‘little bird’ in Yiddish and came to mean ‘gay’ among Yiddish speakers as well. In a rudimentary Internet search, I discovered that the word ‘fag’ began to mean ‘gay’ in American slang in the early 1900s, at the peak of the Eastern European Jewish…
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