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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Books
Rejecting Art for Art’s Sake at the Canadian Jewish Book Awards
The New York literary scene may currently be all caught up in Book Expo America, but in Toronto a smaller literary celebration is being held tonight at the Canadian Jewish Book Awards. Among the honorees are Robin McGrath for her Newfoundland-based novel, “The Winterhouse” (Killik Press) David Sax for his book, “Save the Deli” (Houghton…
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Bucky Shvitz
For his latest comic, Eli Valley embraces the genre of hard-boiled detective noir with a hero determined to solve an epidemic of lost identity. Click on the thumbnail to the right for a larger version: Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His column, “Comics Rescued From a Burning Synagogue in Bialystok and Hidden in…
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Born Grumpy, With a Talent for It
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens Twelve, 448 pages, $26.99 Christopher Hitchens writes best when he writes with disdain. In book-length attacks on Mother Teresa (“The Missionary Position”), The Clintons (“No One Left to Lie To”), and religion (“God is Not Great”), he has shown himself to be an entertaining and erudite polemicist. And though Hitchens is…
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Growing Up Rich
Elliot Allagash by Simon Rich Random House, 240 pages, $23 Simon Rich has it all: He’s very funny (in The New Yorker, writer for “Saturday Night Live”), fairly smart (though he went to Harvard, not Yale) and eternally youthful. He successfully completed a two-book deal from Random House, which he signed before he even left…
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At 101, Director Points His Art at Persecution
It took a 101-year-old Catholic to give Judaism its due at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Manoel de Oliveira, the oldest active director in the world, breathed new life into the ancient issue of persecution in “The Strange Case of Angelica.” Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) may sound like she’s the subject, but the…
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Twice Beware the Aryan Nation
Thinking about Iran and the Bomb the other day (what newspaper reader doesn’t?), it struck me as a curious coincidence that, for the second time in some of our lifetimes, Jews are being threatened with mass destruction in the name of the same ancient Indo-European word. This is because “Iran” and “Aryan” are connected. The…
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June 4, 2010
100 Years Ago in The Forward After learning from friends that his wife was cheating on him, William Schwartz, a chicken dealer on East 9th Street, found the alleged transgressor in a saloon. Upon seeing Schwartz enter the saloon, the man in question, a Pennsylvania Railroad employee named John Strumpf, ran into Weinstock’s Crockery Store….
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Say Cheese
At the turn of the 20th century, a young immigrant named Ben Moskowitz took a job as a dairyman among the chaotic jumble of pushcarts and crowded markets in Lower Manhattan. Two generations later, his son and grandson — Joseph and Adam Moskowitz — carry on his legacy at their international cheese and specialty food…
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Video: Forward 50 Panel
Each year, the Forward 50 honors the men and women who are most instrumental in shaping the American Jewish story. Forward editor Jane Eisner recently led a panel discussion at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington D.C. with activist and president of the American Jewish World Service Ruth Messinger, The Weekly Standard’s editor…
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Books South Carolina’s Franklin J. Moses: Scalawag, But No Paskudnyak?
A scalawag may be a nogoodnik or even a paskudnyak, but in the subtitle of Benjamin Ginsberg’s brisk, informed “Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag during Radical Reconstruction” from Johns Hopkins University Press, “scalawag” has a more precise historical meaning. Applied after the Civil War to Southern whites who joined political forces with freed…
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Not Drowning But Waving
Painting whimsies for glossy magazines may be no great cultural achievement, but neither is it proof against more profound investigation. Illustrator and designer Maira Kalman is a sterling example of how an artist can do both. A major touring exhibition, “Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World),” is at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art,…
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