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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Books
Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels, From One Generation to the Next
Fans of comic books and graphic novels are mourning the death of Harvey Pekar, who died today in his Cleveland home at the age of 70. Pekar was mainly known for authoring the autobiographical series “American Splendor,” which documented his lower-middle class Jewish upbringing in Ohio. Pekar also wrote “Our Cancer Year,” after being diagnosed…
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Books Gary Shteyngart Can’t Read
Haha. Or if you’re Gary Shteyngart feigning a Russian accent in his new book trailer, it might sound more like chah-chah. Book trailers are often too long and boring: earnest author fidgeting on a Brooklyn stoop, reciting the plot of her novel. You’re watching it thinking, “Stop telling me what happens. That’s what your book…
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When Is a Glass Box Not Just a Glass Box?
Answer: when it houses Philadelphia’s new National Museum of American Jewish History. Scheduled to open in November, the museum is dominated by a massive glass facade and does not, at first glance, appear that different from other modernist glass and steel edifices in the United States. But looking behind the museum’s glass “veil” reveals a…
The Latest
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Caught Between Burlesque and Belief
Peep Show By Joshua Braff Algonquin Books, 272 pages, $13.95 After Joshua Braff’s excellent but largely unheralded “The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green,” his second novel is another coming-of-age story set in the mid-1970s. In “Peep Show,” though, the protagonist, David, and his sister are trapped by divorcing parents between two closed Jewish worlds of…
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Cultural Materialism
Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America By Ken Koltun-Fromm Indiana University Press, 358 pages, $70 Being an Americanist in a Jewish studies department can be, from time to time, a humbling experience: When your colleague down the hall is educating her students about the Akkadian and Sumerian sources of the Torah or helping them…
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Picture This
Chris Stein, founding member with Debbie Harry of the musical group Blondie, wants to publish a photo book about New York’s punk rock scene. “It will have all the dead people and everything,” Stein said from his home near Woodstock, N.Y. “I have a picture of Anthony Kiedis” — the very much alive lead vocalist…
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Rivers Run Through the Bible Lands
Bill Morris writes that he has been “struck by the coincidence” of three rivers that flow partly or wholly through Israel, or along its borders, having names that start with the same syllable: the Jordan, or Yarden in Hebrew; the Yarmuk, an eastward-flowing tributary of the Jordan that joins it south of the Sea of…
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Don’t Throw Away Yemen
Every so often, I’m seized by the compulsion to clean out my overpopulated drawers and closets and to dispose of all the stuff that I’ve accumulated over the years. Usually that compulsion passes quickly, but not this time: I was determined to deaccession. The process, though, was a halting and incomplete one, for no sooner…
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July 16, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Two weeks ago, a woman saw another leave a lot of garbage in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The first woman told the other that she should clean up, and that newspapers had written about how Jews are slobs. After a dispute and no resolution, they left. Later, both picked up…
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Measuring Mahler, in Search of a Jewish Temperament
This article originally appeared in the August 23, 2002 edition of the Forward. We are reprinting it today in honor of the 150th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s birth. As a small ensemble of Viennese musicians, along with his own daughter Andrea, played examples of Jewish folk music and Judenpolkas, Philip Bohlman, associate professor in the…
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A Perennial Wunderkind
Despite his mastery of the weary insomniac tone, Harold Bloom, who turns 80 on July 11, has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, youthful intellectual vigor as master of the intellectual zetz (wallop, in Bloom’s native Yiddish). Born in the East Bronx to an Odessa-born garment worker and a housewife who emigrated from near Brest-Litovsk, Bloom…
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