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
Chabon and Alter: Is it Esprit d’escalier or Trepverter?
Robert Alter discussed “tough Jews” with Michael Chabon on March 18 as part of the Berkeley Seminars in Modern Jewish Culture Lecture, but there seemed to be a gap in the Jewishness. Alter, the Berkeley professor and great critic of Jewish writing, interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon and asked about the author’s exuberant style, the…
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It’s a Sin
Dramatic adaptations are both a sort of marriage and a kind of alchemy: a mystical merging of two artists to produce a new creation in a different form. This is fitting for Isaac Bashevis Singer, since matrimony and magic both provide subjects for much of his work, including his short story “The Unseen,” which has…
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Books Yiddish on the Psychoanalyst’s Couch: USA vs. France
In the English-speaking world, psychoanalyzing Yiddish, and the way it is spoken, is often done with a dollop of humor, as in “Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods” by Michael Wex, appreciatively reviewed by the Forward. French Jews, on the other hand tend to approach the subject comparatively soberly, as…
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Books The Susan Sontag of the Venetian Ghetto: Sarra Copia Sulam
According to Don Harrán, Sarra Copia Sulam was the first Italian Jewish woman to “excel” as a public literary figure, writing in various forms and leaving a “personal imprint on them.” She was a kind of Susan Sontag of the Venetian Ghetto. Sulam was also prominent because of her beauty and wealth (her husband was…
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Books Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot vs. Hitler
Agatha Christie (1890–1976), has long been underestimated by readers and fellow writers alike, despite her 80 novels which have sold a reported four billion copies. For example, the astute mystery writer P. D. James, in her newly published “Talking About Detective Fiction,” complains that Christie, with her “pasteboard characters,” has not had a “profound influence…
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The Mortara Case
If, as Christians believe, there is a hell, then surely Pope Pius IX earned a place in it for the kidnapping of the 6-year-old Jewish child of the Mortara family in 1858. New York’s enterprising Dicapo Opera Theatre commissioned, and has just given the world premiere of, a new opera based on this sensational true…
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Out of the House of Bondage
When I first came to London in 2001 and, in my brazen, comfortable-in-my- skin North-American way, wished a fellow performer a “happy Passover” during a workshop, she was shocked and cringed, and later told me to “shh in public.” This year, however, the London Jewish community is gearing up for the Other Seder, a 300-person…
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The Israeli Madonna
In politics, Iranian nuclear power is causing Israel concern, but for more than 20 years, an Iranian-born Israeli pop powerhouse has been causing Israelis nothing but pleasure. Israel’s most successful and renowned female vocalist is known by all as Rita. Being known by her first name is only one of the reasons the sensual diva…
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Books Why Is This Night Different? Who’s Asking?
Open-Eyed Heart-Wide Haggadah By Debra Jill Mazer, edited by Shira Leba Batalion, designed by Margo Jennifer Akroyd Double Gemini Press, 62 pages, $32.95 In Every Generation: The JDC Haggadah Commentary by Ari L. Goldman, Foreword by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Devora Publishing, 96 pages., $24.95 The Kabbalah Haggadah: Pesach Decoded By Yehuda Berg The Kabbalah Centre…
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Fussing on the Cliff
All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems By Charles Bernstein Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $26 A few years ago, following a John Zorn concert, I was standing outside, chatting with an acquaintance about the phenomenon of the Jewish avant-garde. Suddenly, a man of a certain age, with a strong Brooklyn accent, barged in:…
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Signposts to the Middle of Nowhere
Neal Gale writes from St. Paul, Minn.: “My parents, both American-born Yiddish/English speakers, would use two words that referred to places that were hard to find or get to: ‘Yah-Chupetz-Ville’ and ‘Allah-Drerden.’ What do these words really mean?” Mr. Gale’s parents had a sense of humor. “Yah-Chupetz-Ville” is none other than Sholom Aleichem’s Yehupetz, the…
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