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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The Nigun Project: Silent Song
I have known Basya Schechter since I was a teenager — longer than I have known any of my other Nigun Project collaborators, thus far. And “Pharaoh’s Daughter,” Basya’s remarkable world fusion singing-songwriting project, has become a phenomenon in the Jewish music world. Somehow over the years of frequently crossing paths and sharing a band…
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Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, Hello Grandkids of My Original Fans
From this you make a living? No undertaking deserved that Jewish punch line more than turning the French folksong “Frère Jacques” into a parody called “Sarah Jackman.” But Allan Sherman showed how that could be done. Sarah Jackman, Sarah Jackman How’s by you, how’s by you? How’s by you the family? How’s your sister Emily?…
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Are They Giving an Oscar to an Anti-Semite?
Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences intends to award an honorary Oscar to iconic French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard on November 13. But will the academy be honoring a notoriously vocal, albeit French-speaking, anti-Semite? Admired for avant-garde films like “Breathless” (1960); “My Life to Live” (1962) and “Contempt” (1963), Godard is one of the…
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Books Soviet Literature in Dark Times
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Translated by Ezra Glinter. When I bought Natalia Gromova’s book, “The Downfall: The Fate of a Soviet Critic in the 1940 and ‘50s,” it didn’t occur to me that it would have a Jewish dimension. I’m generally interested in this period and in this subject, and…
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Books ‘I Remember Papa,’ Fottorino Says of his Moroccan Jewish Father
At the tender age of 50 Éric Fottorino is not just CEO of the company which owns the French daily “Le Monde,” but also a prize-winning novelist. And now Nice-born Fottorino has just produced an intensely personal memoir addressing his Jewish ancestry, “Questions for my Father,” recently published by Les éditions Gallimard. Fottorino belatedly reconnected…
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Being Black and Jewish in America
Originally published in the Forward April 22, 1994. “I usually introduce myself as ‘Robin Washington, I’m black and a Jew.’ I want to put my identity in your face; I want you to deal immediately with who I am,” grinned the 37-year-old independent filmmaker and managing editor of Boston’s African-American weekly Bay State Banner. Mr….
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Reaping the Peace Dividend
Amid the press of our hectic, activity-filled daily lives, important milestones often go unnoticed. September 2, 2010, was one of those occasions. Its existence barely registered in my household or, I suspect, in yours. But it should have, for 100 years ago, on or about September 2, the conditions of modern life changed markedly —…
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What Modern Orthodoxy Thinks of Its Neighbors
The Relationship of Orthodox Jews With Believing Jews of Other Religious Ideologies and Non-Believing Jews Edited by Adam Mintz KTAV, 401 pages, $30 Like a picture, a title is occasionally worth a thousand words. Such is the case in the most recent publication of the Orthodox Forum, an intellectual think-tank of centrist Orthodox rabbis and…
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Mixing in Diabolical Circles
Jack Rosenthal of Mamaroneck, N.Y., writes to me about the Satanic image of the Jew in medieval Christian culture and, specifically, about the words “Mephistopheles” and “Satan.” “Satan,” of course, comes from the Bible, most familiarly from the Book of Job, and Mr. Rosenthal proposes a Hebrew etymology for “Mephistopheles,” as well. This he does…
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Theology in the Poconos
Nemesis By Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pages, $26 ‘The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. Then she stepped out to the edge of the diving board and looked foggily into the pool; it could have been drained, myopic Brenda would never have known it.” These very first…
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An Overpacked and Empty Case
The Sonderberg Case By Elie Wiesel, translated from French by Catherine Temerson Random House, 192 pages, $25 Elie Wiesel is a writer with the power to bring us close to existential absolutes: life and death, suffering and transcendence, guilt and innocence, faith and the loss thereof. Throughout his long and fruitful career he has worked…
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