Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Kasztner: Hero or Devil?
Gaylen Ross’s splendid new documentary, “Killing Kasztner,” comes at a time when a new generation of Israelis is rediscovering a forgotten conflict, one that threatened to tear apart Israeli society in the 1950s. Until recently Rudolf Yisrael “Rezso” Kasztner had been the forgotten person in Israel. An ironic and puzzling situation since in the mid…
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How Moses Built America
Fans of Dan Brown’s latest novel, “The Lost Symbol,” may well profit by perusing Bruce Feiler’s new book, which argues that the true secret of American history is not Masonic, but Mosaic. “Moses helped shape the American dream,” Feiler writes toward the end of “America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story.” “He is our true…
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Clearing up the Meshugas for Maureen Dowd and William Safire
Rashi Fein writes from Boston: “In a column in the New York Times on September 30, Maureen Dowd writes that the late William Safire chastised her for her spelling of ‘meshugas’ in the sentence, ‘Cheney & Co. had shoehorned all their meshugas about Saddam’s W.M.D. into Colin Powell’s U.N. speech.’ According to Safire, ‘mishegoss’ would…
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October 23, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward Jewish academics in Austria have been, for a while already, fighting a battle to have Jews recognized as a distinct nationality. This issue originated in the university, where Jewish students from Galicia and Bukovina were required to give their nationalities as Polish or Ruthenian, but then also had to…
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VIDEO: Jewish Communities Reach the Finnish Line
Dina Kantor grew up in Minneapolis to a Jewish father and a Finnish mother who had converted. Her Jewish and Finnish worlds were quite separate but, in 2006, she went to Finland to explore the Finnish Jewish communities of Helsinki and Turku. Originally treating it as part of her MFA program at the School of…
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Music Ending the De Facto Ban on Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’
Growing up I didn’t much think about my wedding. This is not to say I didn’t dream about the man I would one day marry; I did that plenty. But the details — a white tulle dress, a tiered fondant cake — were never part of that revelry. I have stayed true to the girl…
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In the Image of God
The Book of Genesis Illustrated By R. Crumb Norton, unpaged (220 pages, oversized) $24.95 hardback. To say this book is a remarkable volume or even a landmark volume in comic art is somewhat of an understatement. It doesn’t hurt that excerpts of the book appeared during the summer in the New Yorker and that the…
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Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Dark of Night
Citizens of America take note: one of the central institutions of modern American life — the post office — is on the verge of disappearing. Like the nickelodeon, it may soon be consigned to the dustbin of history. I don’t mean to be an alarmist but my mailbox of late has been crammed with so…
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Don’t Be a Shmuck All Your Life
How To Be a Mentsh (& Not a Shmuck) By Michael Wex HarperCollins, 224 pages, $24.99. Michael Wex, author of the best-selling book “Born To Kvetch,” is the “Sneaky Chef” of contemporary Jewish culture. Like the cookbook author who advises parents to slip puréed broccoli into the brownie batter, Wex writes books that look and…
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In the Belly of the Rhinoceros
‘Lebanon” opens with a golden field of sunflowers gently waving in the breeze and ends with the same field with a sole, unmoving tank in it. Nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed. For Shmulik the gunner (Yoav Donat), Yigal the driver (Michael Moshonov), Hertzel the loader (Oshri Cohen) and Assi the officer (Itay…
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Rashi, Wiesel: Why, Why, Why?
Rashi: A Portrait By Elie Wiesel Translated from French by Catherine Temerson NextBook and Schocken Books, 107 pages, $22 ‘Why Rashi and why me,” asks Elie Wiesel, in the preface to “Rashi,” a slim biography that is the latest offering in the Jewish Encounters series by NextBooks. Rashi is commonly thought to be an acronym…
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