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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Decades in Transition: A Lens on Ethiopian-Israelis
Irene Fertik is an American photojournalist who has been documenting the Ethiopian-Israeli community for the past 20 years. She’s captured the community’s highs and lows as they transition from an agricultural to an industrial society. Despite the immense challenges facing Ethiopian-Israelis, Fertik says the community is incredibly resilient, proud of their history and optimistic about…
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Reproducing Madoff
When the Bernard Madoff scandal broke in 2008, some Jews feared a rise in anti-Semitism, predicting that age-old stereotypes of the greedy Hebrew would be awakened and again perpetuated. Now, nearly two years later, despite a minor increase in typically anonymous, bigoted comments on websites and blogs, it remains mostly a Jewish obsession: How could…
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Restoring the ‘American Sistine Chapel’
We Americans like to broadcast our religious allegiances, erecting crosses in the Mojave desert, adorning our public squares with nativity scenes and Hanukkah menorahs, and festooning our courthouses with replicas of the Ten Commandments. Even the public library, that most hallowed “shrine of letters,” has seen fit to celebrate the word of God — or,…
The Latest
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A Swede Among the Sprites
Beyond Saab, Volvo, ABBA and Ikea, the English-speaking world is relatively ignorant of Swedish culture, but 19th-century Swedish-Jewish painter Ernst Abraham Josephson, although still under-celebrated outside Scandinavia, is increasingly being seen by academics and art historians as a key figure in European modernism. William Butler Yeats, in “The Bounty of Sweden” (1925), a literary thank-you…
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Heist of Ages
After the Auction Written and published by Linda Frank 170 pages, $14.95. There are 1 million new books every year — literally — but it’s impossible to know what to read. In this brave new world, not only can’t you tell a book by its cover, but you also can’t tell it by its publisher…
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A Slice of Hebrew Pizza
Irwin Rosenthal writes from Woodstock, N.Y.: “Recently, I was at a bar mitzvah in California where the bar-mitzvah boy delivered his address in Italian. In it he said that he had chosen to emphasize his Roman heritage by including pizza ebraica dolce as one of the foods served at the Kiddush. Unfortunately, I had to…
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August 13, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward There have been strange goings-on in the large tenement house at 161 Monroe Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Fourth-floor resident Yetta Grossenberg told police that she was getting ready to leave her apartment, when suddenly she heard wild screaming coming from down the hallway, followed by gunshots. As…
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Jews and Beer
Nothing cools down a rash of steamy summer nights like a frosty pint of beer. Unless, that is, you are Jewish — because aside from the occasional l’chaim around the Kiddush table or on Purim night, Jews don’t drink. Especially not beer. Of course, anyone who has ever witnessed their Uncle Barry getting soused on…
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Books Susan Shapiro’s Book Becomes a Book Mitzvah
Last night, Susan Shapiro’s latest novel, “Overexposed” (St. Martins, August 2010), was “Book Mitzvahed” in an elaborate and touching candle lighting ceremony at Greenwich Village’s Arte Restaurant. A hilarious book about the intertwined lives of two women who are battling big-city ambitions, “Overexposed” took 13 years to be published. In the interim, Shapiro published successful…
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Excerpt: ‘Overexposed’
When my best friend Elizabeth and my brother Ben landed in New York for their holiday weekend wedding extravaganza, Ben called me from their hotel in Rye, mentioning that Elizabeth’s mother had chosen flute music for their Sunday evening reception. “Flute music?” I asked. “For when we walk down the aisle,” Ben explained. “That’s the…
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Of Schmucks and Schlemiels
Paramount Pictures’ new laugh-out-loud comedy “Dinner for Schmucks” is only the latest in a crop of recent films and novels to idealize not the schmuck, but the schlemiel. Directed by Jay Roach and executive produced by Sacha Baron Cohen — no stranger to the appeal of the schlemiel — “Dinner for Schmucks” is a remake…
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