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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Bernard-Henri Lévy Gets Purim Pranked Early
Purim has come early this year for 61-year-old French “public intellectual” Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL), who just published two new books in France, “De la guerre en philosophie: Essai” (On Philosophical War: Essay) and “Pièces d’identité: Chroniques” (Identification Papers: Articles). The latter consists of over 1300 pages of Lévy’s journalism, around 300 pages of which are…
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Books Cyril Kornbluth’s Postwar Dystopias
Readers of the intelligently edited anthologies “Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction” and “More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction,” both from Jewish Lights Publishing, are aware that the postwar development of the sci-fi genre was to a large extent a Yiddishe invention. Alongside…
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Creative Creation
The Center for Jewish History is a hidden treasure buried in the secular haven of New York City’s West Village. With an intellectually pleasing symmetry, Yeshiva University Museum (housed at the Center) is hosting a profoundly religious exhibit from an extremely secular town. San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum organized In the Beginning: Artists Respond to…
The Latest
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Poetic Yearnings
Yehuda Halevi By Hillel Halkin Nextbook/Schocken, 368 pages, $25. The medieval poet Yehuda Halevi was a man consumed by yearnings, for women, for love, for the divine. All these found expression in Halevi’s prose and poetry. But perhaps none plagued the poet so much as his longing for Israel, a desire that would remain unsatisfied…
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A Loving Levinas on War
The Obi-Wan Kenobi of 20th-century Jewish philosophy, Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, has grown in fame and stature since his death in 1995. Acclaimed for his philosophy of the “other,” which recognizes morality — and behavior toward others — as the basis for any philosophical thought, Levinas offers a decisive break with his onetime teacher…
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Playing in Mali
Jeremiah Lockwood just returned from a trip to the West African nation of Mali with his band, The Sway Machinery. The band performed at the Festival au Desert and recorded an album with Malian guest artists. Americans grow up hearing “Timbuktu” used to mean the most remote place in the world. Though readily reachable these…
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Putting the Id in Yid
Forward reader Ben Warwick wants to know why the Yiddish words for a Jew and for Yiddish, yid and yidish, are often spelled with an initial alef rather than an initial yod, so that they appear in print as id and idish. This is something I myself have often wondered about. Now, under Mr. Warwick’s…
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Archivists and Art
ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN ARCHIVISTS HONORED BY SCONE FOUNDATION “Without the pain of primary research, we would remain hostage to ill-informed writers or authorities,” said Stanley Cohen, founder of the Scone Foundation, at the January 25 presentation of the foundation’s Archivist of the Year award, held at the CUNY Graduate Center at Fifth Avenue and 34th…
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Books Jewish Impostors, Past and Present
Although Shabbetai Zevi naturally gets most of the attention, Jewish history has been marked by a series of impostors. On February 16, Bloomsbury USA publishes a collection by the late New Yorker reporter St. Clair McKelway, “Reporting at Wit’s End,” which includes the complete 1968 book “The Big Little Man from Brooklyn” about the Jewish…
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Books An Arabic Bestseller About Beirut’s Jews
A new book, documenting Lebanon’s largely vanished Jewish community is a bestseller — in Arabic. In fact, “Wad Abu Jamil,” a book by BBC journalist Nada Abdelsamad named after the formerly Jewish neighborhood in Beirut, is available only in Arabic, though translations into English and French are forthcoming. According to Alexandra Sandels of the LA…
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February 19, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward David and Anna Saltz lived with their eight children in Greenville, Miss., where they ran a shoe store. Down the street was a custom tailor shop, where 19-year-old Abie Glassman worked. Right under David’s nose, Glassman and 45-year-old mother of eight Anna commenced an affair. Although the affair seemed…
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