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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Measuring Mahler, in Search of a Jewish Temperament
This article originally appeared in the August 23, 2002 edition of the Forward. We are reprinting it today in honor of the 150th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s birth. As a small ensemble of Viennese musicians, along with his own daughter Andrea, played examples of Jewish folk music and Judenpolkas, Philip Bohlman, associate professor in the…
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A Perennial Wunderkind
Despite his mastery of the weary insomniac tone, Harold Bloom, who turns 80 on July 11, has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, youthful intellectual vigor as master of the intellectual zetz (wallop, in Bloom’s native Yiddish). Born in the East Bronx to an Odessa-born garment worker and a housewife who emigrated from near Brest-Litovsk, Bloom…
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Peoplehood Vs Israel
Peoplehood and support of Israel are two major values of the American Jewish community. But they are in direct conflict, both in principle and in practice. In principle, the values of peoplehood and Israel are on a natural collision course. Peoplehood — the notion that we are all united purely by dint of being members…
The Latest
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Southern Comfort
Charleston, S.C., has had a Jewish presence since 1695, and now, a few centuries later, it has introduced a Jewish Culture Festival, which its organizers hope will teach Charleston about its Jews and teach other Jews about the South. It’s a long history. Jews arrived barely 25 years after the British landed and established the…
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The Kindness of Strangers
The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness By Oren Harman W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 464 pages, $27.95 Ever since Darwin first published “On the Origin of Species,” scientists have struggled to figure out the evolutionary origins of altruism. How can the theory of “survival of the fittest”…
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By Golly, It’s the Deity Again
Jonah G. Sinowitz writes: “Since I was a young child, I’ve written the word G-d with a hyphen. I still think in terms of G-d, even though everyone around me uses the word Hashem. On the other hand, I have no problem writing ‘god’ with a small ‘g.’ Today, for example, in referring to what…
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July 9, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Leo Hirshfield, a saloonkeeper in Haverstraw, N.Y., was shot to death by a former employee. Hirshfield, a well-liked local man with a wife and two daughters, was in the basement of his saloon corking beer bottles, when he was surprised by the appearance of John Zipeth, a bartender whom…
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Stuart the Jewish Turtle Goes to South Africa
The World Cup may have focused the world’s attention on South Africa, but when cartoonist Eli Valley’s angry protagonist, Stuart the Jewish Turtle, hops a plane to Johannesburg, it’s not to see the games. Stuart’s gone on a mission to stop Judge Goldstone from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah, and he meets Michael Oren, Alan…
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Music Sara Kamin: Singer-Songwriter-Psychotherapist
Singer and songwriter Sara Kamin jokes that she never sleeps. That’s because she’s juggling a burgeoning music career with teaching college-level psychology classes and completing her post-graduate studies in psychotherapy. The Toronto-based Kamin, 30. has three folk/pop/blues albums under her belt. And her music has been getting increased attention — and airplay — thanks in…
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Songs of Love And Hate
Largely unknown abroad, Amir Benayoun is one of the most talented musicians in Israel. Composing and performing a complex blend of traditional North African, classical Western and Israeli rock music, the 35-year-old Benayoun has earned the acclaim of critics and the adoration of fans across musical and social divides. His voice, at once powerful and…
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Modernism 2.0 in a Post-Holocaust Novel
In a Dark Wood: A Novel By Marcel Möring***| Translated by Shaun Whiteside HarperCollins, 464 pages, $24.99 With sly perversity, Marcel Möring declares on the overleaf of “In a Dark Wood,” his surreal, sprawling post-Holocaust epic: “This is a novel. Nothing in this book is true.” While that statement might be factually accurate — Möring’s…
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