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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Natural-Born Storyteller
‘Irving was a natural-born storyteller. He had a flair for telling movie stories, and he knew about the medium — more than most writers knew.” Quite a compliment, from no less than Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood and Broadway’s greatest writers. What makes Hecht’s praise unusual is that he said it not of a fellow…
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The Shlemiel as Experimental Mensch
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s tales are never quite what they seem, and the musical “Shlemiel the First,” adapted from a play that Singer based on his Chelm stories, is no exception in providing surprising depths. Who but Singer could make adultery (at least the characters think it’s adultery) seem so innocent? After the final curtain call…
The Latest
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‘Ai No Corrida’ Sidney Franklin, the Brooklyn Bullfighter
Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway’s Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin By Bart Paul University of Nebraska Press, 336 pages, $29.95. The concept of a Jewish bullfighter from Brooklyn seems, like that of a Jewish pirate, exotic beyond all probability. Yet Sidney Franklin, born Sidney Frumpkin in Park Slope in 1903 to a…
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Deep Panning
Dick Luxner sent me an e-mail in which he inquires whether I know anyone who can read 16th-century Catalan (I don’t), and ended with the P.S.: “Can you confirm my thought that the ‘pan’ in the phrase I remember from my childhood, ‘Wipe that smile off your pan,’ comes from the Yiddish word for face,…
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February 26, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Chandelier-maker Jacob Greenthal, known in the saloons of the Manhattan’s West Side as “Mike the Jew,” is in critical condition after being stabbed multiple times by a group of unknown assailants. The lone witness, a taxi driver who was threatened by the gang of attackers, told police that he…
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Books A Graphic Account of the Israeli Countryside
The past year has seen a bumper crop of Jewish-themed graphic novels, with subjects ranging from the recent history of the Middle East (Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza”) to the ancient mythology of the Middle East (R. Crumb’s “Genesis”) to the poets of the Beat Generation (Harvey Pekar and Ed Piskor’s “The Beats”). Still, the…
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In a Closet With No Light
Homosexuality is one of the most profound and least tractable problems confronting Orthodox Judaism today. The party line — that attraction to members of one’s own sex is simply another illicit desire that must be overcome — is not a sufficient response to the painful experiences of gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews. “Eyes Wide Open,”…
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Bernard-Henri Lévy Gets Purim Pranked Early
Purim has come early this year for 61-year-old French “public intellectual” Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL), who just published two new books in France, “De la guerre en philosophie: Essai” (On Philosophical War: Essay) and “Pièces d’identité: Chroniques” (Identification Papers: Articles). The latter consists of over 1300 pages of Lévy’s journalism, around 300 pages of which are…
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Books Cyril Kornbluth’s Postwar Dystopias
Readers of the intelligently edited anthologies “Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction” and “More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction,” both from Jewish Lights Publishing, are aware that the postwar development of the sci-fi genre was to a large extent a Yiddishe invention. Alongside…
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Creative Creation
The Center for Jewish History is a hidden treasure buried in the secular haven of New York City’s West Village. With an intellectually pleasing symmetry, Yeshiva University Museum (housed at the Center) is hosting a profoundly religious exhibit from an extremely secular town. San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum organized In the Beginning: Artists Respond to…
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Poetic Yearnings
Yehuda Halevi By Hillel Halkin Nextbook/Schocken, 368 pages, $25. The medieval poet Yehuda Halevi was a man consumed by yearnings, for women, for love, for the divine. All these found expression in Halevi’s prose and poetry. But perhaps none plagued the poet so much as his longing for Israel, a desire that would remain unsatisfied…
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