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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Journalist for All Seasons
To filmgoers, Joseph Kessel is best remembered as the novelist whose spicy “Belle de jour” was adapted into a 1967 Catherine Deneuve film by director Luis Buñuel. But a more abiding image might be Kessel the academician, who, when required to carry a sword for his 1964 induction into the Académie française, used one that…
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A Sukkah Bound For New York
New Yorkers have gotten used to the celebration of Jewish holidays in public places. The 32-foot-tall Hanukkah menorah lit regularly at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza isn’t as tall as the spires of nearby churches (or hotels), but it is still a pretty assertive statement of Jewish presence and pride. Once the city opened the door…
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Reader, He Married Her
AN AMERICAN TYPE By Henry Roth W.W. Norton & Co., 283 pages, $25.95 Henry Roth’s new posthumous novel, “An American Type,” owes the attention it is getting, and indeed its very existence, to the author’s 1934 classic modernist Jewish novel, “Call It Sleep.” Nothing less than that masterpiece could have inspired the devotion required to…
The Latest
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July 2, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward When fire engulfed a sweatshop in the Division Street building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, it was not known if all the workers had escaped. It turned out that the owners, brothers Morris and Wolf Shuman, were still inside, as were two female workers and a man known only…
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The Nigun Project: From Our Hiding Places
“From Our Hiding Places,” this month’s installment of The Nigun Project, features Alexander Benaim, the singer and songwriter behind the indie rock band The Harlem Shakes. Benaim, a composer and writer, is now working on a solo project, which will draw on the sounds of his family’s Moroccan and Iranian origins. Benaim’s flair for creating…
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Jeffrey Goldberg and the Tukhis Police
The political commentator and national correspondent of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, whom I first met many years ago at the office of the Forward when he was writing for this paper, has run afoul of the foul-language police. Interviewed by New York Times journalist Helene Cooper in the Sunday Times’ June 6 Week in…
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A Thoroughly Diverting Servant
The Fifth Servant By Kenneth Wishnia William Morrow, 387 pages, $24.99 While I like to pretend that I’m a highbrow, I’ve always been a sucker for genre fiction — in my case horror novels, thrillers and science fiction. Sometimes it’s just great to read a book that is unembarrassed about its desire to entertain. And…
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Israel’s Freedom Fries Moment
It was, I suppose, predictable. In Israel there is now a movement to change the name of Turkish coffee, or kafey turki, as it is known in Hebrew. Bad enough, the movement’s proponents say, to be insulted by the Turkish government, denounced by its prime minister and have one’s flag burned by Turkish demonstrators without…
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Shakespeare in the Shtibl
In 2006, film director Eve Annenberg stumbled onto Chulent, a weekly gathering of young, alienated Orthodox and formerly Orthodox Jews in Manhattan. She had no idea that she was about to embark on one of the most improbable movies of her career. Four years later she is sending DVDs of her feature-length motion picture “Romeo…
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Communication Breakdown
For The Soul Of France: Culture Wars In The Age Of Dreyfus By Frederick Brown Knopf, 336 pages, $28.95 The Dreyfus case has never been out of season. A century and more has passed since the conviction by court-martial for treason of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the subsequent legal campaign on his behalf, the ultimate reversal…
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Minority Man
‘The Monayer Family: Three Videos by Dor Guez,” on exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York until September 7, presents a series of short films that offer an intimate, subtly critical assessment of contemporary multicultural Israel. Guez’s films consider the Christian Arab population — a minority within a minority — whose social identity is…
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