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 Green Note
In 1979 my parents bought me Kenneth Gatland’s “The Usborne Book of the Future.” It struck a note of cautious optimism about possible achievement despite potential pitfalls. Most stark was a page juxtaposing two images: at the top, a prosperous future with clear, tree-lined streets and suburban houses; at the bottom, a brown, murky dystopia…
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Did William Blake Know Hebrew?
Two of William Blake’s greatest patrons were clergymen in the Church of England, under whose rites he was christened, married and buried. But the British poet and artist did not attend church for the last 40 years of his life, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and he and his wife, Catherine, were registered as sympathizers at…
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Yiddish for Comrades
The week of Yom Kippur, you may recall, I published a column about a Yiddish letter, written by a young soldier in the Russian army to his family during World War I, that a reader asked me to decipher. In doing so, I pointed out that the letter writer, although his spelling was generally good,…
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December 11, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward On Manhattan’s East Side, 11th Street resident Israel Gleichman was in the Essex Market Court trying to prevent his 12-year-old son from going to jail. “Until he went to public school,” Gleichman pleaded, “my boy was all right. It was his friends from school who taught him how to…
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Remembering a Great Voice from Regostan: Bukharan Jewish Musician Ilyas Malayev
Often forgotten in the upsurge of interest in Jews from the former Soviet Union, the Bukharans have claim to a grievance. But, on December 14, a gala concert, “Ilyas Malayev: Remembering the Poet Laureate of the Bukharian Jews,” will be performed at New York’s Center for Jewish History, presented by that organization’s An-sky Institute for…
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Anna Sokolow
Alvin Ailey danced for her as a young man. She worked with Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams on Broadway, and taught Patti LuPone and Robin Williams at the Juilliard School. Anna Sokolow passed away in 2000 at the age of 90; she would have been 100 years old in 2010. This inventive, elegant yet gritty…
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Berlin Jews and Jazz
Celebrations for the 70th birthday of legendary jazz label Blue Note Records are taking place at an unlikely venue. The Jewish Museum Berlin is tooting its horn with an exhibition of photographs by two of Blue Note’s Jewish photographers, Francis Wolff and Jimmy Katz. Wolff, a Berlin native, helped found the label in 1939, along…
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Skeletons in the Closet
Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret: By Steve Luxenberg Hyperion Books, 401 pages, $24.99 In a letter written on a yellow legal pad, placed in an envelope marked “Do not open until after my death,” Beth Luxenberg (née Cohen) directed that all her possessions be distributed equally among her children and grandchildren. She…
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The Catskills, Under a New Lens
For anyone who stood on line, week after week, for the Saturday midnight screenings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” in the 1970s, the West Village theater now known as the IFC Center will forever be branded the Waverly. For a time during my teens, going down to that theater with friends to watch the…
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Hell Hath No Fury Like a Lévy Scorned: novelist Justine Lévy’s Latest Screed.
Justine Lévy, daughter of the headline-grabbing French philosopher and “public intellectual” Bernard-Henri Lévy (known in France as BHL), is once again in the news with a new novel from Paris’ Stock publishers, “Mauvaise fille” (Bad Daughter ). Like her previous books, “Mauvaise fille” is not really a “roman à clef” because no “clef” (key) is…
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Typography in the Talmudic Tradition: American Jewish Designer Herb Lubalin
Fans of splendid graphic design and typography have until December 8 to catch the exhibit, “Lubalin Now” at The Cooper Union’s Cooper Gallery. It opened November 5 to honor the highly influential Jewish typographer and graphic designer Herb Lubalin who died in 1981. Known for his work for the magazines “Avant Garde,” “Eros,” and “Fact,”…
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