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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Bassists Without Borders
Avant-garde art is often criticized for its complexity and self-indulgence, and for its disdain for matters beyond aesthetics. “Deep Tones for Peace,” an international musical project involving 13 high-profile bass players from around the world, might just be the most compelling argument yet against such criticism. The project, whose CD/DVD combo has just been made…
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The Interview: Unorthodox Desires
Miryam Kabakov, editor of a new essay collection about Orthodox lesbians,”Keep Your Wives Away From Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires,” visits the Forward podcast studio to discuss coming out to her traditional parents, visiting a lesbian in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of B’nai Brak, Israel, and how she believes gays and lesbians can find their place…
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First and Final Refusal
Sitting amid the clutter of his studio and standing in front of a blank brick wall, Boris Lurie has the look of a man who has experienced enormities. Balding and mustachioed with a heavy brow and deep-set eyes, his image appears in a series of 12 photographs taken in 1989. At the bottom of the…
The Latest
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Love in the Time of Technology
Super Sad True Love Story By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 352 pages, $26 In his first two novels — his blini-wrapped Bildungsroman, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” and his highly absurdist “Absurdistan” — Gary Shteyngart coaxed his darkest humor out of imagined settings, alternate universes only one step removed from our own. It’s the satirist’s smartest…
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Core Connection
Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism By Shaul Kelner New York University Press, 304 pages, $35 Shaul Kelner’s book is auspiciously timed, with discussion still swirling about American Jewish attitudes toward Israel. While much is contested about Peter Beinart’s controversial essay, there is agreement that a sizable proportion of young people, especially…
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Al Pacino’s Pain
Al Pacino is channeling my accountant: the same stooped humpback; the same flailing, floppy arms; all the physical discomfort that implies a deeper, metaphysical discomfort with being in the world. A flapping sense that his only defense against the indignity of existence is the sterile mathematics of money. It’s the kind of performance you expect…
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Sights Unseen
‘Cameras are everywhere, especially in places where disasters suddenly erupt, creating the illusion that no catastrophe is left unphotographed,” Ariella Azoulay observed of “Untaken Photographs,” an exhibit she curated. “But regime-made disasters — which usually do not erupt suddenly, continue for some time and lack a spectacular visual dimension — tend to evade the archival…
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From Hebrew to Ugaritic and Back Again
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced on June 30 that three linguists, working under its auspices, have developed a successful computer system for deciphering the ancient language of Ugaritic. At the coming annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the three will present a paper on a new computer system that, “in a matter…
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July 23, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Morris Drechsler owns a barbershop in Brooklyn and is a very busy man. Opening early and closing late, he felt bad that he didn’t see his wife and children very much, and as a result, he asked one of his workers, an immigrant by the name of Morris Kozovsky,…
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Video: The Arrest of Women of the Wall’s Anat Hoffman
Watch the video of the July 12 arrest of Anat Hoffman, the chair of Women of the Wall, as she and other members of the group make their way from the Western Wall plaza to Robinson’s Arch: The Sisterhood conducted the first interview with Hoffman following her arrest. Read it here.
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Dancing Along, With Color
Art Spiegelman’s world of powerful drawings and the Pilobolus Dance Theater’s playful style intersect in an unusual collaboration that challenged the Pulitzer Prize-winning author to move out of his downtown studio and his own head. The dance piece, “Hapless Hooligan in ‘Still Moving,’” was set to premiere July 12 at the Joyce Theater, in New…
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