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
The Curious Case of the San Nicandro Converts
In a new book, “The Jews of San Nicandro,” author John Davis, the chair in Modern Italian History at the University of Connecticut, sheds light on the little-known but highly curious tale of how a community of Italian Catholic peasants came to embrace Judaism during the rise of Fascism and the Second World War. Using…
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WATCH: The Forward’s Exclusive Richard Dreyfuss Interview
Richard Dreyfuss is starring in the new off-Broadway play “Imagining Heschel,” in which the Oscar-winning actor plays Abraham Joshua Heschel — the renowned rabbi, theologian and civil rights activist. Dreyfuss recently visited the Forward studio, where he sat down with the Forward’s Dan Friedman. Video edited by Nadja Spiegelman
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Books Making Kosher Food Is an All-Night Affair
Earlier this week, Sue Fishkoff wrote about watching a goat get slaughtered and people who only keep kosher on holidays. She is the author of “Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish…
The Latest
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A Close Look at the Bigotries of Reality TV
Jennifer Pozner’s new book, “Reality Bites Back,” is out this week. In its pages, she takes our favorite “guilty pleasure” genre of TV to task for racism, sexism and manipulation of its audience. Pozner spoke recently with The Sisterhood. Her satirical book trailer is below, and the interview follows. Sarah Seltzer: How did your interest…
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Books Our Rack: Yeshiva Girl YA; Bios of Bernhardt, Alcott
NON-FICTION In “Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt Robert Gottlieb,” Robert Gottlieb trims away the fat from the storied life of the legendary actress, who was born Jewish and who was later baptized a Roman Catholic. Gottlieb presents a peppy and concise biography rooted in facts and recorded accounts. The book, the debut title in…
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What Remains?
Photographer Yuri Dojc and filmmaker Katya Krausova recount their journey to document the last shards of Slovakian Jewry in the video below: The shattering of Jewish glass on November 9, 1938, did more than superficial property damage. As a government-sponsored pogrom at the heart of civilized Europe, it rocked the humanistic foundations of the industrial…
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Disparate Worlds
Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian Avi Steinberg Nan A. Talese. 24.95 Avi Steinberg’s memoir of his time as a prison librarian is a catalog of juxtapositions. The product of a suburban modern Orthodox community and a graduate of Harvard, Steinberg seems an unlikely candidate for a rough Boston prison, where…
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Italian Hilltop Conversion
The Jews of San Nicandro John Davis Yale University Press, 256 pages, $30 In a remote southern Italian town in the 1930s, a group of Catholics who had never before met any Jews began practicing their own idiosyncratic brand of Judaism. Helmed by a disabled and charismatic WWI veteran named Donato Manduzio, who fancied himself…
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Going Up, One More Time, Gentlemen Please
Three distinguished readers have sent me four e-mails concerning my October 15 column on the expression “making aliyah.” All make good points. Let’s start with Noyekh Miller, the redoubtable editor of the Yiddish language website Mendele. He e-mailed me twice. The first time was to say: “You’re right in pointing to the increasing proportion of…
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Harry Houdini: The Art of Assimilation
How to explain the durability of Harry Houdini — subject of a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York? He died more than 80 years ago in Detroit, yet his fame remains undimmed and unabated. Indeed, utter his name to adolescents and — even though they’re unlikely to have seen any of the…
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A Mexican Suitcase Finds Its Context
In 1939, famed war photographer Robert Capa left a suitcase of film negatives in the care of his darkroom manager, Csiki Weiss. Capa, who fled Paris for New York in advance of the German invasion, would never again see the suitcase, which held dozens of rolls of undeveloped film that he and his colleagues, Gerda…
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