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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Passover Performance Poetry
Pesach literally means “skipping” — as in skipping the Jewish homes. But also, as in skipping a beat, breathless, syncopated, throat parched from so much yelling. That’s right, yelling. Passover is all about that. Family members who have not seen each other in much too long, with their serious opinions on serious matters. The rabbis…
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Books The DisUnited States: Vladimir Pozner’s 1930s America
When times are tough for capitalists, Marxists love to gloat. That is the conclusion to be drawn from an account of Depression-era America, “Les États-Désunis” (“The DisUnited States”), newly reprinted by Lux Editions in Montreal. Its author, the prolific Russian Jewish writer Vladimir Salomonovitch Pozner (1905-1992), a friend of Isaac Babel who was long resident…
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Vader: Half Jew
Eli Valley explores the “Star Wars” universe through the lens of Jewish continuity, intermarriage and communal policy. Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His column, “Comics Rescued From a Burning Synagogue in Bialystok and Hidden in a Salt Mine Until After the War,” appears monthly in the Forward. His Web site is www.evcomics.com.
The Latest
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Leonard Lopate: Former Yiddish Choir Boy
For 25 years Leonard Lopate has been interviewing and conversing with the world’s leading artists, novelists, chefs, scientists and politicians on WNYC, New York’s leading NPR station. After 20 years he was interviewed by Tom Brokaw and now, for his Silver Jubilee, here he is with the Arts & Culture editor of the Forward, Dan…
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Books Sherman Alexie Beats Lorrie Moore
Last night Sherman Alexie beat Lorrie Moore and Barbara Kingsolver. And people applauded as he did so. A shonda? No, just the shortlist at the presentation of the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction on March 23. Alexie, the Native American writer, won for “War Dances.” Lorrie Moore lost for “A Gate at the Stairs” and Barbara…
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Gate to Identity
A Gate at the Stairs By Lorrie Moore 322 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95 In Lorrie Moore’s profound novel, “A Gate at the Stairs,” Gail, the Jewish mother of the half-Jewish protagonist Tassie, metaphorically sits in the dark. She doesn’t loom or pace, or hover and we never learn too much about her, but her…
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April 2, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward The usually sleepy Jewish quarter of Baltimore is in a tizzy after the Forward’s exposure of a racket in the city’s kosher meat industry. Apparently, meat distributors, butchers, rabbis and the heads of the Jewish community were all wrapped up together in a long-term scheme to skim money off…
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Broza Dons Cowboy Boots
At one point during a Writers in the Round concert that took place in Houston in March 1994, Townes Van Zandt gestures at his fellow songwriters — David Broza, David Amram and Linda Lowe — and declares that they are “genuine giant talents!” He did not use the word “we” in that assessment, but most…
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Sundry Hungers
On Passover, both our physical and spiritual appetites are honored. So for what do we most deeply hunger? Richard Schiffman, in the following poem and another online, meditates on the often contradictory longings that are at play in a Seder, or a life. Sundry Hungers In the dream, a woman swallowed — one after the…
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What Are We Commanded To Do?
I’ve written a lot of columns since On Language first started appearing in the Forward more than 19 years ago, and as I’ve tried writing a special column for the Seder night each year, I’ve written 19 Seder night columns, too. It’s only natural, then, to have forgotten some of them — and so when,…
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We Are All Simon Schama: The Threat of an Undefined Jew
The Invention of the Jewish People By Shlomo Sand, translated by Yael Lotan Verso, 344 pages, $34.95 It was the year’s biggest helping of humble pie. Less than a month after a heated takedown of Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People” in the Financial Times, the very same reviewer, writing in Italy’s respected…
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