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 Pit of Tel Aviv, A Preliminary Damage Report
Avi Steinberg’s first book, “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” is now available. 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: I was on a roll…
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My Days With Dylan
On Sunday December 5, the event “Bob Dylan and the Band: What Kind of Love is This?” sponsored by the Forward, celebrates one of rock and roll’s most powerful collaborations. A symposium at the 14th St Y — where an exhibition of Dylan memorabilia and photographs by William G. Scheele (a road manager for The…
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Writer and Actress Diane Flacks on How ‘It Gets Better’
Diane Flacks, a Jewish actress and writer, appears in the “It Gets Better Canada,” the country’s LGBT community’s artistic contribution to the anti-bullying campaign. Flacks can be seen in the popular, 12-minute video saying, “In my son’s class, a lot of the kids say, ‘I have two moms!’ and they don’t. But they wish they…
The Latest
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: Conclusion
In celebration of Jewish Book Month, The Arty Semite has partnered with the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA) and the Jewish Book Council to present “30 Days, 30 Texts,” a series of reflections by community leaders on the books that influenced their Jewish journeys. Today, Jewish Book Council director Carolyn Starman Hessel concludes…
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Books Pen Pals Reunited: Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt
The friendship between the great kabbalist Gershom Scholem and the political scientist Hannah Arendt famously foundered in the 1960s after a disagreement over Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” an account, of the trial of the Nazi war criminal. Scholem reproached Arendt for a lack of “ahavath Yisrael,” to which Arendt readily concurred that she lacked “ahavath”…
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Richler’s Version
‘Barney’s Version” is a film a decade in the making. The unusually long development and production schedule wasn’t the result of the filmmaker fine-tuning digital-effects shots or the studio slowly unfurling some bloated marketing campaign, as is often the case. Rather, it was a matter of producer Robert Lantos ensuring that everything about “Barney’s Version,”…
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Blackened by Filthy Lucre
Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype By Abraham H. Foxman Palgrave/Macmillan. 256 pages, $26 Capitalism and the Jews By Jerry Z. Muller Princeton University Press. 272 pages, $24.95 The nexus of Jews, capitalism and money became an unholy one early on. One side of this coin is the classic anti-Semitic myth of “Jewish…
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A Worm in the Machine
Irwin Rosenthal writes: “The November 18th New York Times carried an article entitled ‘Worm Was Perfect for Sabotaging Centrifuges.’ In it appeared the sentence: ‘Ralph Langner, a German expert in industrial control systems who has examined the [computer] program [in question] and who was the first to suggest that the worm may have been aimed…
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Sovereign or Beast?
French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida, who was the dean of deconstruction and died in 2004 at age 74, still divides opinions dramatically. On October 26, Yale University Press issued in paperback David Mikics’s 2009 “Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography,” a concise study that does not fully answer the question in its title, but seeks…
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A Quiet Man to Explosive Effect
The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the soviets the Atom Bomb By Allen M. Hornblum Yale University Press, 464 pages, $32.50 Assigned the code names “Goose” and “Arno,” Harry Gold, the son of Jewish immigrants from Kiev, served as a spy and courier for the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s until the end…
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The Revivalist
At the end of John Cohen’s 1963 film, “The High Lonesome Sound,” Roscoe Holcomb, a coal miner, construction worker and banjo player, sits hunched over a songbook on the threadbare sofa in his ramshackle house, singing the Baptist hymns he learned as a boy. Holcomb has long since abandoned the austere Old Regular Baptist Church…
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