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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A Rich Eastern European Dish
The Jews in Poland and Russia: Volume I, 1350-1881 By Antony Polonsky The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 568 pages, $59.50 The academic world has become, as of late, almost grotesquely distended by piles of books and articles on the narrowest and most obscure of subjects, written in increasingly opaque scholarly jargon. A mere glance…
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21st Century Mann
The Escape By Adam Thirlwell Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $25 ‘No one likes a deserter, an escapee, because it proves the fact that there is always a choice. So often, it is easier to believe that life is a trap.” So asserts the wily and knowing narrator of Adam Thirlwell’s at once brilliant…
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A Life of Breath
At the start of Ruedi Gerber’s documentary film, “Breath Made Visible,” a dancer moves onstage with the supple grace of a cat. She takes off an outer garment to reveal legs that, under other circumstances, would draw the eyes and wolf-whistles of construction workers. Fluidly, she takes off her gloves and then her mask. And…
The Latest
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The Method Man
It helps if Catherine Deneuve likes you. When I spoke to him in his studio, Leonard Lopate — celebrating 25 years at WNYC this year — noted how helpful it was for his journey from art student to radio host, to win the approval of French film stars: Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Jeanne Moreau, and others….
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A Thrill From Beyond the Grave
Love and its crushing disappointments are at the center of Hanoch Levin’s newly discovered play, “Thrill My Heart,” “Hartiti et Leebee” in Hebrew, running now at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv. The play, written by Israel’s most renowned playwright, was discovered shortly after Levin’s death in 1999 and caused a stir of excitement and…
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Of Fags, Flags, Faggots and Feygeles
David Herszenson of Manhattan writes: “I know that feygele literally means ‘little bird’ in Yiddish and came to mean ‘gay’ among Yiddish speakers as well. In a rudimentary Internet search, I discovered that the word ‘fag’ began to mean ‘gay’ in American slang in the early 1900s, at the peak of the Eastern European Jewish…
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April 30, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Louis Cantor, a Philadelphia-based pimp, was sentenced to six years in prison for raping and forcing a woman, Dora Rubin, into a life of prostitution. The trial, which riveted Jewish Philadelphia, contained moments of real drama, such as when Rubin took the stand to testify against Cantor. The entire…
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The Nigun Project: At the Table
Listen to Jeremiah Lockwood and Brian Chase perform the second installment of the Nigun Project, “At the Table”: Part of my motivation for starting the Nigun Project — in which I reinterpret nigunim, with a range of musical collaborators — was to have a good reason to spend sizable chunks of time staring at old…
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The Surfing Jihadi
American Taliban By Pearl Abraham Random House, 272 pages, $25 Just in case the worldwide hatred of America wasn’t enough, here’s something else to worry about: “homegrowns,” or Americans who become so identified with radical Islam that they are willing to perform acts of violence. Sometimes it’s abroad, as with John Walker Lindh, whose conversion…
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Too Clever by Half
Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate By Mark Oppenheimer Free Press, 256 pages, $25 Being a smart kid isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be, but it usually pays off in the end. That, at least, is the lesson taught by Mark Oppenheimer in his alternately tender and comic memoir, “Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject…
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The New Face of Yiddish Theater
In 1996, Shane Baker looked like just another New York City cliché: a young gay man, recently arrived in the Big Apple from Kansas City, Mo., waiting tables at Tavern on the Green and planning his entry into the world of New York theater. But Baker’s story was unusual, even for New York. A Yiddish-speaking…
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