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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Dada Does Tinseltown
Orto-Da, an experimental theater group based in Tel Aviv, arrived at the Los Angeles International Airport irritable and exhausted. Delayed because of a visa battle that left their lighting technician stranded in Israel, the troupe members collected their baggage and raced to the Carlson Family Theatre in Calabasas, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb, to begin…
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A Writer During Apartheid, and After
Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008 By Nadine Gordimer W.W. Norton and Company, 752 pages, $39.95 ‘Could Philip Roth erase the tattoo of the Nazi camps from under the skin of his characters?” Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer rhetorically asks, illustrating her assertion that “none of us can… ‘choose our subjects’ free of the contexts that…
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Through a Gunsight, Darkly
Israeli director Samuel Maoz has accomplished something truly remarkable with his first feature film, “Lebanon,” which opened in the United States on August 6. Without resorting to Computer-Generated Imagery or 3-D, Maoz has created a profound, visceral world of war that puts special effects to shame. “Lebanon,” which last year became the first Israeli film…
The Latest
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Why We Need Akkadian
An Akkadian Lexical Companion for Biblical Hebrew: Etymological- Semantic and Idiomatic Equivalents With Supplements on Biblical Aramaic By Hayim ben Yosef Tawil KTAV Publishing House, 456 pages, $125 Reading the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, is tough. For one thing, it’s very, very old, and not refracting the text through our 21st-century prism is difficult. For…
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August 20, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward The start of the fall season is still a few weeks away and, as usual, there is trouble in the Yiddish theater world. It seems that the manager of Manhattan’s Liptzin Theater has signed an agreement with union laborers to handle his sets. On the other hand, the managers…
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Books Why There Are No Israeli Superheroes
Uri Fink, who 30 years ago created Israel’s first superhero, in the form of Sabraman, has a theory about why comic book superheroes have caught on only in America. “It’s naive just thinking people will go out and fight the bad guys out of the goodness of their hearts,” he told the Forward. “It’s Americans’…
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Bluffing the Bolshoi
At the beginning of Radu Mihaileanu’s mischievous new comedy film, “The Concert,” we meet an observant Jewish trumpet player in Moscow named Viktor and his son, Moshe, who seems to have no connection to Yiddishkeit. At the end of the movie, Viktor’s yarmulke has been replaced by a cowboy hat, while Moshe has peyes and…
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Decades in Transition: A Lens on Ethiopian-Israelis
Irene Fertik is an American photojournalist who has been documenting the Ethiopian-Israeli community for the past 20 years. She’s captured the community’s highs and lows as they transition from an agricultural to an industrial society. Despite the immense challenges facing Ethiopian-Israelis, Fertik says the community is incredibly resilient, proud of their history and optimistic about…
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Reproducing Madoff
When the Bernard Madoff scandal broke in 2008, some Jews feared a rise in anti-Semitism, predicting that age-old stereotypes of the greedy Hebrew would be awakened and again perpetuated. Now, nearly two years later, despite a minor increase in typically anonymous, bigoted comments on websites and blogs, it remains mostly a Jewish obsession: How could…
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Restoring the ‘American Sistine Chapel’
We Americans like to broadcast our religious allegiances, erecting crosses in the Mojave desert, adorning our public squares with nativity scenes and Hanukkah menorahs, and festooning our courthouses with replicas of the Ten Commandments. Even the public library, that most hallowed “shrine of letters,” has seen fit to celebrate the word of God — or,…
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A Swede Among the Sprites
Beyond Saab, Volvo, ABBA and Ikea, the English-speaking world is relatively ignorant of Swedish culture, but 19th-century Swedish-Jewish painter Ernst Abraham Josephson, although still under-celebrated outside Scandinavia, is increasingly being seen by academics and art historians as a key figure in European modernism. William Butler Yeats, in “The Bounty of Sweden” (1925), a literary thank-you…
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