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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Core Connection
Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism By Shaul Kelner New York University Press, 304 pages, $35 Shaul Kelner’s book is auspiciously timed, with discussion still swirling about American Jewish attitudes toward Israel. While much is contested about Peter Beinart’s controversial essay, there is agreement that a sizable proportion of young people, especially…
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Al Pacino’s Pain
Al Pacino is channeling my accountant: the same stooped humpback; the same flailing, floppy arms; all the physical discomfort that implies a deeper, metaphysical discomfort with being in the world. A flapping sense that his only defense against the indignity of existence is the sterile mathematics of money. It’s the kind of performance you expect…
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Sights Unseen
‘Cameras are everywhere, especially in places where disasters suddenly erupt, creating the illusion that no catastrophe is left unphotographed,” Ariella Azoulay observed of “Untaken Photographs,” an exhibit she curated. “But regime-made disasters — which usually do not erupt suddenly, continue for some time and lack a spectacular visual dimension — tend to evade the archival…
The Latest
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From Hebrew to Ugaritic and Back Again
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced on June 30 that three linguists, working under its auspices, have developed a successful computer system for deciphering the ancient language of Ugaritic. At the coming annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the three will present a paper on a new computer system that, “in a matter…
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July 23, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Morris Drechsler owns a barbershop in Brooklyn and is a very busy man. Opening early and closing late, he felt bad that he didn’t see his wife and children very much, and as a result, he asked one of his workers, an immigrant by the name of Morris Kozovsky,…
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Video: The Arrest of Women of the Wall’s Anat Hoffman
Watch the video of the July 12 arrest of Anat Hoffman, the chair of Women of the Wall, as she and other members of the group make their way from the Western Wall plaza to Robinson’s Arch: The Sisterhood conducted the first interview with Hoffman following her arrest. Read it here.
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Dancing Along, With Color
Art Spiegelman’s world of powerful drawings and the Pilobolus Dance Theater’s playful style intersect in an unusual collaboration that challenged the Pulitzer Prize-winning author to move out of his downtown studio and his own head. The dance piece, “Hapless Hooligan in ‘Still Moving,’” was set to premiere July 12 at the Joyce Theater, in New…
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Books Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels, From One Generation to the Next
Fans of comic books and graphic novels are mourning the death of Harvey Pekar, who died today in his Cleveland home at the age of 70. Pekar was mainly known for authoring the autobiographical series “American Splendor,” which documented his lower-middle class Jewish upbringing in Ohio. Pekar also wrote “Our Cancer Year,” after being diagnosed…
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Books Gary Shteyngart Can’t Read
Haha. Or if you’re Gary Shteyngart feigning a Russian accent in his new book trailer, it might sound more like chah-chah. Book trailers are often too long and boring: earnest author fidgeting on a Brooklyn stoop, reciting the plot of her novel. You’re watching it thinking, “Stop telling me what happens. That’s what your book…
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When Is a Glass Box Not Just a Glass Box?
Answer: when it houses Philadelphia’s new National Museum of American Jewish History. Scheduled to open in November, the museum is dominated by a massive glass facade and does not, at first glance, appear that different from other modernist glass and steel edifices in the United States. But looking behind the museum’s glass “veil” reveals a…
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Caught Between Burlesque and Belief
Peep Show By Joshua Braff Algonquin Books, 272 pages, $13.95 After Joshua Braff’s excellent but largely unheralded “The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green,” his second novel is another coming-of-age story set in the mid-1970s. In “Peep Show,” though, the protagonist, David, and his sister are trapped by divorcing parents between two closed Jewish worlds of…
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בעת אַ ייִדישער סאָלדאַט ליגט אין אַ סאָוועטישן מיליטערישן שפּיטאָל פֿאַרמעסט זיך זײַן מאַמע קעגן דעם ייִדישן הויפּט־דאָקטער
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