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 Big-Headed Dandy
Bernard Weill writes: “I have often heard the Yiddish word ‘shvitzer’ applied to someone but have been too embarrassed to ask what it meant. Is it a derogatory term?” A shvitzer is a braggart, and the term is definitely derogatory, though not in the extreme. A shvitzer need not necessarily be a bad, unkind or…
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March 19, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward As tragedies go, it will be difficult to beat the story of Solomon Schwalb, a resident of 86th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, who, in biblical fashion, was tricked into marrying the sister of the woman he loved. Having recently arrived in America, he was taken in by…
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Books Fuggin’ Addendum: More Kupferberg
Tuli Kupferberg — 86 year old beat poet, musician and activist, and famed leader of the avant-folk band The Fugs — has been on the news lately. An article on him appeared in the New York Times in late January , another piece was published here, in the Forward just last week, and Tablet carried…
The Latest
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An Inquisition for the 21st Century
One of the most striking things about “Conviction,” a new adaptation of Oren Neeman’s play by Mark Williams and Ami Dayan (who also stars), is the impassioned, dreamy description of Jewish rituals by the 15th-century Spanish priest Andrés González (Dayan) as he learns them from his beloved, the Jewess Isabel. The exhilaration in his voice…
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Israel’s ‘Most Sexist’ Ads
Sex sells. This marketing approach has become so commonplace that it is not only used to sell cars, beer, and football, but also to sell seemingly innocuous items like yogurt, laundry detergent, toothpaste, potato chips and lawn mowers. It is even used to target female consumers, for products such as facial cleanser, diet soda, perfume,…
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Something Happened, and Then It Didn’t
Nothing Happened and Then It Did By Jake Silverstein W.W. Norton & Co., 231 pp, $23.95 There are many good reasons to avoid reviewing books you don’t like. Among the principal ones are that books are so damnably hard to write and so easy to disparage. There is also the feeling of kicking an object…
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Books And On The Seventh Day She Rested
The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time By Judith Shulevitz Random House, 217 pages, $28 ‘The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” Judith Shulevitz’s look at the Judeo-Christian practice of setting aside every seventh day for rest, is both an extended exercise in public history and a spiritual autobiography….
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Books No Biblical Bodice-Ripper
The Prophet’s Wife By Milton Steinberg Behrman House, 384 pages, $24.95 One expects a book called “The Prophet’s Wife” — with a cover illustration of a lush, bucolic biblical setting — to be one more attempt at cashing in on the recent vogue of romantic, sexually suggestive fiction on biblical themes, written by women, and…
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Books An Eloquent Meditation on Memory
Blooms of Darkness By Aharon Appelfeld Schocken Books, 2010, 288 pp, $24 Aharon Appelfeld has earned an esteemed, if lonely, reputation for himself as Israel’s writer of the Nazi and pre-Nazi era. This landscape and its immediate aftermath form his near-exclusive literary topography. As a result, he is more often compared to Central European Jewish…
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Books The Beaten Cannoneer
Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim Edited and with an introduction by Mark Cohen Foreword by Dan Wakefield Syracuse University Press, 296 pages, $29.95 Literary criticism is literature that discusses other literature, situating whatever book or poem historically, while at the same time, relating the literary work to the extraliterary: to…
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Books A Murder Mystery In Little Palestine Brings Middle East to America
The fourth assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery By Matt Beynon Rees Soho Crime, 336 pages, $24 When Omar Yussef arrives in Little Palestine – the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, neighborhood populated by Palestinian-Americans — the aging schoolteacher first finds a headless dead body in his son’s apartment, then watches his son get arrested by an overzealous…
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