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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Wealth and Self-Loathing
Rich Boy By Sharon Pomerantz Twelve, 517 pages, $24.99 The scene comes near the middle of Sharon Pomerantz’s sprawling new book, “Rich Boy,” and one slice of dialogue captures the central tension in this page-turning debut novel. Robert Vishniak, the protagonist, is driving a cab through the dangerous streets of 1970s Manhattan — bearded, depressed,…
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Anti-Semitism 101
The conceit of Randy Cohen’s new play, “The Punishing Blow,” requires a bit of setup. At some point in the past, second-rate college professor Leslie (Seth Duerr) was arrested for what amounts to an overblown case of public drunkenness — specifically, ramming his car into a ginkgo tree and then waking the neighborhood with his…
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If English Was Good Enough for Jesus Christ…
Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible By Robert Alter Princeton University Press, 208 pages, $19.95 We are truly in a “biblical” era. The sheer volume of contemporary work translating, commenting on, interpreting and exegeting the Bible is astounding for what one would think would be a well-worked mine. But for Robert…
The Latest
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A Cordoban Chord
Michael Hecht writes: “A timely article might be about the implications of the name Cordoba House for the proposed Islamic center at Ground Zero. Is it perhaps intended as the name of the once — and future — capital of Islamic Spain?” ” photo-credit=”Image by WIKI COMMONS” src=”https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/675x/center/images/cropped/mosquecordoba-082510-1425716335.jpg”] By “future capital,” Mr. Hecht is, I…
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September 3, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Paula Lipman, who resides in New York City on Clinton Street and arrived in the United States seven years ago, was brought by ambulance to the mental ward at Bellevue Hospital after falling into a bout of hysteria. Apparently, her husband disappeared six months after their wedding, which was…
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Frum Amid the Horror
The Felix Nussbaum house, a museum that opened in 1998 and is located in Nussbaum’s native city of Osnabrück in northwest Germany, closed for renovations July 26. A two-story extension designed by the museum’s original architect, Daniel Libeskind, will provide room for a new foyer, a library and other amenities. The renovated Nussbaum House is…
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Vive La Resistance, Encore!
The heroics of the French resistance have long intrigued movie buffs and filmmakers. Perhaps the most famous scene in cinema history is in “Casablanca,” when the tormented Ingrid Bergman bids adieu to Humphrey Bogart and chooses to escape with her resistance leader spouse. Now, French director Robert Guédiguian’s mesmerizing “The Army of Crime” (“L’armée du…
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Ten Years of Yiddish Summer Weimar
Each summer, it seems, it gets harder to keep track of the Jewish culture and klezmer festivals around the world. This summer, we saw Klezfest London, the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, and then — starting at the end of August — New York’s Yidish-Vokh, KlezKanada in Quebec and Ashkenaz in Toronto. These are being…
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Never Again, and Again
It’s an irresistible pitch: Take a Holocaust survivor who has worked to combat Holocaust denial, and combine her story with those of three other genocide survivors, respectively from Rwanda, Congo and Darfur, to show the need for “Never Again.” It is, sadly, a pitch “The Last Survivor” does not live up to. In its present…
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How To Carry On
Displaced Persons By Ghita Schwarz William Morrow, 352 pages, $25.99 When American-born novelist Cynthia Ozick published her 1997 New Yorker essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” the possessive stance of the author, then 69, was clear. By the time that Tova Reich, the American-born author of the novel “My Holocaust” (HarperCollins, 2007) — and a generation…
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Conservative? Moi?
I learned from the August 6 issue of the Forward that Conservative Judaism is thinking of a name change. Once the largest of the three major American Jewish denominations, the movement has fallen on hard times. It has long been a truism that, sandwiched between Orthodox Judaism on one side and Reform Judaism on the…
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