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 Good Guy To Know
What would you say about a lifeguard who took nearly two-and-a-half years to answer a cry for help? Well, that’s me. Rummaging through a drawer of my desk the other day, I found this letter from Carolyn Shapiro of Washington, D.C., dated July 2, 2007: “Worthy Philologos, “Help! Help! I am a member of a…
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The Meditation Of Travel
To warm ourselves before a stove in a foreign province, to rise early, the wayfarer’s prayer on our tongues, to watch fish blaze through shallow streams and think of home, to shift our load from one shoulder to the next and be reminded of the faces of lovers that failed us ages ago. All these…
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December 25, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward Samuel Rogoff, a resident of Manhattan’s Harlem section, was brought into Special Sessions Court, accused by the police of being New York City’s “king of the pimps.” Police told the judge that Rogoff operates dozens of underground brothels throughout the city; his method is to rent apartments and set…
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A WASPy Jew Finds Her Roots
My 93-year-old father recently died at home in his sleep. He was Jewish, but he was buried by a reverend in a nondenominational cemetery in Connecticut. A few years earlier, he had told me he had mixed feelings about being buried by a rabbi who’d speak in “that language you don’t understand.” “You mean Hebrew,…
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Zeroing In
What do you know about Zero Mostel? If all you know is that he was the original Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Jim Brochu’s one-man show, “Zero Hour,” introduces you to the real force that provides this excuse for a tour-de-force role. Brochu (pronounced Bro-shu) wrote the piece, and over the years he has…
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Nowhere Near the Finish Line
In a September 9 article in The New York Times, David Mamet offered a précis of his new play, “Race,” which opened on December 6 at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theater: “As a Jew, I will relate that there is nothing a non-Jew can say to a Jew on the subject of Jewishness that is…
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Therapist by Day, Boxer by Night
A bloody mouthguard floats in a bucket that I am holding under a young Hispanic man’s face. It is a frantic moment between rounds, and I am working the corner, reaching through the ropes of the boxing ring and mopping his dark kinky hair with a torn white towel. Inside the ring, kneeling at Manuel’s…
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December 18, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward A young man by the name of Samuel Chapin committed suicide in New York’s Turkish Baths on 1st Street and Third Avenue. After taking a shvitz for about an hour, Chapin, who also lived on 1st Street, gave one of the employees a 50 cent tip, then got into…
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The Miracle of Hanukkah Songs
When it comes to singing the praises of Hanukkah, Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song” has become a contemporary classic, yet his is hardly the first — nor, I suspect, the last — musical expression of affection and appreciation for the ancient holiday and its Maccabean heroes. “So drink your gin-and-tonic-ah, and smoke your mara-juanic-ah,/If you…
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Seduced by Stavans
A Critic’s Journey By Ilan Stavans University of Michigan Press, 208 pages, $24.95 Ilan Stavans is no stranger to the pages of the Forward. Since 1994, the Mexican-American writer and critic has contributed numerous essays and reviews to the newspaper, including an article from 2007 called “Forverts & I.” In it, he reflects on his…
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Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet
Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet By Seth Rogovoy Scribner, 336 pages, $26.00 In writing “Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet,” what he describes as a “Jewish biography” of Bob Dylan, Seth Rogovoy joins an ever-growing guild of critics and thinkers who have attempted to offer definitive interpretations of one of the most purposefully elusive and iconic…
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