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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Of Boy Cantors and Little Jewesses
With graduation upon us, ’tis the season to think about lofty matters, about responsibility and duty and legacy and heritage. In that connection, consider, for instance, the transmission of Jewish culture from one generation to the next, a task that has bedeviled the Jewish community for centuries now. The Jews of a much earlier time…
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Chai Noon
Sherriff’s badges weren’t the only Jewish stars in the Wild West. Consider gunslinger Jim Levy, Deadwood mayor Sol Star, Jewish Pueblo Indian chief Solomon Bibo, blue jeans inventor Levi Strauss and David May, the merchant who built his trading post into a chain of national department stores now controlled by Macy’s. Even O.K. Corral gunfighter…
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Troubadors of Post-Modernity
Poetry didn’t always reside in the neatly formatted volumes that line our bookshelves. Before the age of Gutenberg — let alone Kindle — poetry existed mainly as performance, spoken or sung by traveling bards, epic balladeers and troubadours. It was a living, communal experience vastly different from the solitary reading that informs our encounter with…
The Latest
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June 18, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Forsyth Street resident Feige Gabeh, 20, disappeared this week and is rumored to be in hiding with Joe Shuster, a former boarder in her parents’ home who also disappeared from his wife and two children. Shuster and Gabeh, who knew each other from the Old Country, were having an…
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Auschwitz Puppets
The performance of KAMP by the Dutch theater group Hotel Modern is a blend of puppetry, film, art installation and sound that attempts, according to its press release, “to imagine the unimaginable: the greatest mass murder in history, committed in a purpose-built city.” When I saw a recent production at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn,…
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Foreman Fights Tough, but Cotto Prevails
The scene at Yankee Stadium: The fate of Jewish welterweight Yuri Foreman’s World Boxing Association title was sealed when the fighter slipped in round seven of his Saturday night championship bout against Miguel Cotto. Foreman fell, twisting his right leg awkwardly at the knee, then limped through two further rounds before Cotto won a technical…
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Rating Jewish Filmmakers’ Portrayal of Women
Does your film have two women in it? Do they have names? Do they talk to each other? About things other than men? These are the questions, the only questions, of the Bechdel Test, otherwise known as the Mo Movie Measure. Like the APGAR test, it’s a flawed system. But in the same way that…
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The Life (and Death and Life) Of the Rebbe
The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson By Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman Princeton University Press, 382 Pages, 29.95 Most Jewish New Yorkers vividly remember the Crown Heights riots of August 1991, four horrendous days of attacks on Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jews that resulted in the brutal murder of Yaakov Rosenbaum, a young…
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Honesty Is Real
Wherever You Go By Joan Leegant W.W. Norton 272 pages, $23.95 Finally, a novel about Israel by an American Jew that’s written well and without sentimentality. Joan Leegant’s “Wherever You Go” is unafraid to address the pivotal but ambiguous role that Israel plays in providing an identity for certain types of American Jews. Israel, in…
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Playing it Safe
The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: and Other Stories By Joseph Epstein Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 272 pages, $24 This compact collection of short stories, almost all of them set in Chicago, is about Jewish men of a certain age who have been playing it safe for all of their mostly passionless though not unsuccessful…
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How Belief Has Shaped America’s Laws
THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW By Sarah Barringer Gordon Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 316 pages, $29.95 Legal scholars usually tell us that law, especially constitutional law, shapes religion: nurturing its growth under the Free Exercise clause, while inhibiting its power under the Establishment clause. Sally Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law…
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