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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Are Corporations Evil?
Kyle: Who are the corporations? Hippie: The corporations run the entire world! And now they’ve fooled you into working for them! — (from “South Park”) Ever since Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority, conservatives in America have used moral issues to convince poor Americans to vote against their economic interests. Thanks largely to convincing working-class…
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Ways To Case the Literati
1. A writer — intelligent, disciplined, not without talent — watches as shysters and hucksters game the literary world, writing fake memoirs, peddling fake personal tragedies. He has mixed feelings about their success. It’s not his, which grates, and they often have more chutzpah than literary ability, which infuriates. But also, he admires their bold…
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A Lively Musical Corpus
Although other composers are most suitably celebrated on the anniversaries of their births (July 7, 2010, marked Gustav Mahler’s 150th birthday), it seems appropriate to fete Mahler, the quintessential creator of funeral marches and meditations on death, on the centenary of his Todestag, May 18, 1911. But in Vienna — the city that sold bonbons,…
The Latest
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Who Put the Bop in the Bop Shoo Bop Shoo Bop?
Solomon Miller writes from Huntsville, Ala.: ” photo-credit=”Image by WIKI COMMONS” src=”https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/675x/center/images/cropped/wyclifgent-072910-1425717101.jpg”] “I am puzzled by the origin and pronunciation of the English word ‘Sabbath.’ Since it obviously comes from Hebrew shabbat, why isn’t it ‘Shabbath’? And why the ‘th’ at the end of it? Is this an attempt to mimic an aspirated Hebrew ‘t’?…
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The Nigun Project: Sing for Your Life
When I first came across this nigun in a mid-century Lubavitch anthology, the string of eighth notes that make up the first theme immediately suggested to me the beat for this arrangement. It sounded like a hip-hop beat to me. Through the happy collaboration with Dan Wolf and Tommy Shepherd, of the hip-hop collective Felonious,…
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August 6, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Judge Mayer Sulzberger, president of the American Jewish Committee, has finally come to the conclusion that the American government’s immigration officials are not particularly pro-Jewish. This realization is important because the recent expulsions of Jews from Russia means that more of them will hope to come to the United…
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Slapping the Other Cheek
Film director Todd Solondz is known for making his audiences squirm with discomfort, and “Life During Wartime,” released July 23, is no exception. A sequel of sorts to his film “Happiness” (albeit with a different cast), “Life During Wartime” is a mega-mix of angst, pedophilia, awkward puberty and big-time familial dysfunction. But the film is…
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From Suitcase to ‘Suite Française’
The Life of Irène Némirovsky, 1903–1942 By Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, translated by Euan Cameron Alfred A. Knopf, 448 pages, $35 Many recently released novels have been written by authors who are unavailable for interviews, on account of their posthumous status. But even more thrilling than the publication of works by Roberto Bolaño, Ralph…
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Commentary Quite Contrary
The Commentators’ Bible: The JPS Miqra’ot Gedolot — Leviticus Edited, translated and annotated by Michael Carasik Jewish Publication Society, 270 pages, $75 The act of exegesis is not an innocent or a neutral enterprise. Jacques Derrida taught us that exegesis means intervening in the text and asserting power over it, and thereby over the reader….
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Perplexed by the Guides?
I’m not one for magical thinking, but the way Kabbalah — the ancient tradition of Jewish mystical and esoteric wisdom — has evolved in our time does make me wonder. For centuries, Kabbalah was kept secret by a small elite of Jewish men. Its innovative theology and mind-scrambling puzzles were deemed too destabilizing for the…
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Modern Times
Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History By David B. Ruderman Princeton University Press, 336 pages, $35 When does modern Jewish history begin? The answer used to be simple. If your interests were social and political, the date was either 1782, when Emperor Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance granted a degree of emancipation to the…
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