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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January 1, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Hyman Epstein, the former Brooklyn banker who two years ago absconded with more than $60,000 in depositors? money, has finally been arrested. Admitting his guilt, he said that his conscience would not let him rest and that he is ready to accept whatever the justice system doles out to…
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Greek Jews Remembered: Resilient, Passionate, Variegated
The history of Greek Jews is dizzyingly complex. Comprising both the Greek-speaking Romaniotes and the exiled Sephardim of Thessaloniki, some of whom spoke Ladino, the differing cultures are expertly distinguished in K. E. Fleming’s “Greece: A Jewish History” (Princeton University Press) of which a paperback edition is due this spring, and Steven Bowman’s new “The…
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Song, Dance and Oud
In comparison with some forms of Sephardic culture, Ashkenazic Judaism can come out looking as bland as a gefilte fish that’s lost its horseradish. Not to belittle klezmer, Yiddish or, has v’halila, a good matzo ball, but the inflections of Spanish and Ottoman culture in Sephardic arts render the ordinary exotic for the majority of…
The Latest
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A Painter of Rabbinic Primal Screams: Boston Expressionist Hyman Bloom
Art lovers have until January 24 to catch a compelling exhibit at the Yeshiva University Museum, “Hyman Bloom: A Spiritual Embrace.” Originating at Massachusetts’s Danforth Museum of Art the show focuses on Bloom, one of the key Boston Expressionists examined in “Boston Modern: Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism” by Judith Bookbinder (University of New Hampshire…
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To (Richard) Hell and Back
You might think that the Venn diagram circles of arty intellectuals and punk rockers would never intersect. Yet, back in the 1970’s many of the original punk musicians considered themselves primarily poets or writers, with singing just a way to liberate their thoughts from their heads or writing paper. These writers included Patti Smith, Jim…
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Dizengoff and the City
An urbanist discourse is alive and well in Israel, as evidenced by the cultural critic Tamar Berger, who studies Israeli — especially Tel Aviv — space in her acclaimed book “Dionysus at Dizengoff Center” (1998), newly translated into French as “Place Dizengoff” by Actes Sud Publishers by the remarkable Turkish-born writer Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech and long…
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Give It a Rest, Adam Sandler: The New Jewish Holiday Tunes
Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song” turned 15 this year and it’s apparently settled into our collective consciousness as the new holiday standard, a sort of Jewish equivalent to “Silent Night,” or perhaps “White Christmas” (though that’s sort of a Jewish song itself). Yup, it’s all over the media this month. The Forward’s Jenna Joselit Weissman calls…
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Before Zero Hour: A Q&A with Jim Brochu
Award-winning drama “Zero Hour” deals with the life of actor and comedian Samuel “Zero” Mostel. Most famous for his stage version of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Mostel was a complicated character who was at work in showbusiness at the darkest hour of the blacklist. Gwen Orel spoke to Jim Brochu who wrote the…
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Bildung Mendelssohn
How ugly were these porcelain monkeys? Ugly enough that when the West Berlin Senate tried to put one of them in a 1978 museum exhibition about Prussia, a different one was substituted because the original was judged too embarrassing. Composer Felix Mendelssohn had kept the original in his study, to show visitors. To understand why…
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Our Father, In Law
William Kunstler, the late civil rights lawyer, used to brag to his daughters, Emily and Sarah, that he was the only Jew in a youth street gang of Latinos and blacks. Fueled by the values of his faith, Kunstler later commanded turf far beyond his neighborhood. “The work that Bill did with the outcasts, the…
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The Fascination of Israel
Israel vs. Utopia By Joel Schalit Akashic Books, 250 pages, $15.95. The Myths of Liberal Zionism By Yitzhak Laor Verso, 128 pages, $22.95. A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement By James Horrox AK Press, 167 pages, $17.95. A common theme in pro-Israel discourse is that critics of Israel are “obsessed” with the Jewish…
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