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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May 14, 2010
100 Years Ago in The Forward A group of mothers on Manhattan’s Lower East Side has approached the Forward. The ladies have asked that the paper help save their children from certain disaster. “Warn your readers,” the mothers told our reporter, “not to allow their children to go into moving picture houses by themselves. Our…
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Mossad Agent in a Bustier
Thirteen years ago, when you saw the first “Austin Powers” movie, you may have exited the theater feeling somewhat unsatisfied at the film’s conclusion. If only, you thought with a sigh, the film had been about a wacky French secret agent hunting Nazis in Brazil in the 1960s! Maybe, you fantasized, he could even team…
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Life and Times of ‘a Jewish Saint’
When Joe Lieberman’s 2000 vice presidential bid raised prospects of a Jew in the White House, some American Jews could have been forgiven for thinking they’d been there, done that. For 100 years earlier came a president they had already embraced as one of their own: Abraham Lincoln. The special bond that Jews feel for…
The Latest
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Welcome to Cohenworld
Witz: The Story of the Last Jew on Earth By Joshua Cohen Dalkey Archive Press, 824 pages, $18.95 It’s a shame that no one will read this book. Or, rather, it’s an indictment of contemporary reading practices that the scope and flavor of Joshua Cohen’s epic novel “Witz” will escape all but the most passionate…
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‘Sweatshop Cinderella,’ Minus the Happily Ever After
She was “loud, coarse and demanding, constantly intruding her presence everywhere and taking up all the air in the room,” according to literary critic Vivian Gornick. She married twice, divorced quickly and left her daughter with her second husband, the child’s father, in order to write. She was a short-lived star of a writer, whose…
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Private Genius, Public Spotlight
A photography exhibit radiating quiet humanity, honoring the Lithuanian-Jewish photographer Izis, who was born Israëlis Bidermanas, is warming the City of Paris’s chilly official administration building, l’Hôtel de Ville. “Izis, Paris of Dreams” runs until May 29 and is a must-see for anyone visiting the city. A splendid catalog from Les Éditions Flammarion explains the…
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Lens on Apartheid’s Haunting Legacy
For more than half a century, South African photographer David Goldblatt has been probing the emotional core of his native land, capturing the human cost, and the haunting legacy, of apartheid. The Jewish Museum’s new retrospective, “South African Photographs: David Goldblatt,” is the first major overview in New York of Goldblatt’s work in more than…
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Mah Jongg’s Jewish Journey
How did the popular Chinese tile game mah jongg become a favorite pastime — often, a social lifeline — for generations of Jewish women in America? Melissa Martens, senior curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, recently sat down in the Forward studio with Sisterhood contributor…
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Books Our Rack: The Sisterhood Reading List
Beginning this month, The Sisterhood will feature a monthly roundup of book recommendations for our readers. We will include books that are geared toward Jewish women, along with other women’s-interest titles that we believe will be of interest to Sisterhood readers. Nonfiction: • A diverse group of writers share their feminist “aha” moments in the…
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Israel’s Postmodern Flash Fiction
Blue Has No South By Alex Epstein; Translated from the Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay Clockroot Books, 131 pages, $15 Miniature Metaphors of an Airport Longings are more a story than a word. (Though I have never managed to write a story about the airport where I heard Hebrew for the first time in my…
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Finding Rabbis and Wandering Jews
In the 19th century, realist authors like Emile Zola and Anatole France were widely worshipped, but literary Symbolism, with its rejection of everyday realism, and prizing of spirituality, also attracted many European Jewish writers. Particularly in France, there appeared a wave of Jewish Symbolists who had social and political activism that was allied with dreamlike…
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