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 Little Something for the Summer?
Forward staffers and contributors share their picks for beach-friendly reads. The offerings include historical fiction, a three-author memoir about unconventional paths to motherhood and a collection of darkly humorous essays. NOVEL, AND FRESH The Invisible Bridge By Julie Orringer Knopf, 624 pages, $26.95 In a field as crowded with artistic representations as the Holocaust, it’s…
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Religion Within the Bounds of Reason… and Love
Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition By Arthur Green Yale University Press, 208 pages, $26 ‘I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in,” Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of Jewish Renewal, wrote many years ago. Reb Zalman was responding to an imagined atheist, or perhaps an alienated Jew — someone with a…
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Adversary A
The Death of the Adversary: A Novel By Hans Keilson Translated by Ivo Jarosy Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 208 pages, $14.00 Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel By Hans Keilson Translated by Damion Searls Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 144 pages, $22.00 Hans Keilson was born in Germany in 1909 to a working-class Jewish family…
The Latest
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All Stories Are True
Three decades after his death at age 70, the art of socially involved Jewish American painter Ben Shahn has never been more widely admired and discussed. A brilliant catalog by Alejandro Anreus for the landmark 2001 exhibit at the Jersey City Museum, “Ben Shahn and ‘The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti,’” analyzed the artist’s extensive…
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Awake and Act, For It Can Happen Here
On April 8, 1935, congressional legislation created the Works Progress Administration, which developed millions of jobs for the unemployed. WPA agencies placed 8.5 million Americans on the federal payroll, including hundreds of Yiddish actors, writers, scene designers and theater directors hired for the administration’s Federal Theatre Project. On the 75th anniversary of the WPA and…
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Bliss, By Way of Adult Movies
‘Finding Bliss” stars Leelee Sobieski as Jody Balaban, a young film school graduate who heads out to Los Angeles with high and naive hopes for a bright future. Ultimately, the only job she can get is editing porn flicks at the same studio where “Gladiator” was shot. Well, not exactly “Gladiator.” It was “Glad He…
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Jews Behaving Badly
The cringe-inducing spectacle of Jews tied to the world financial implosion took center stage at the recent Cannes Film Festival. Even fiction got in on the act. From investment bankers called out by the documentary “Inside Job” to the haimish yet shady broker played by Frank Langella in the new feature “Wall Street: Money Never…
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Springing From The Tar Heels
The long history and deep roots of Jews in the Tar Heel state are coming to life in an ambitious new multimedia project that kicks off June 14 with an exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. “Down Home,” which encompasses a slickly produced documentary film and handsomely illustrated coffee-table book, celebrates…
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Live Long and Super
Ron D. Wegsman writes from the Bronx: “The Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently carried a feature article about the first supermarket in Israel, the ‘Supersol’ on Ben-Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, which is where my mother shopped for groceries when I was a baby. I had always thought that this supermarket (and subsequent ones in the…
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June 11, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward There was chaos this week at the fifth convention of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union after the event’s chairman, a Mr. Deutsch, refused to allow delegates to give their reports in Yiddish. A number of the delegates informed Deutsch that their reports had been written in Yiddish and…
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Meet the ‘Tichel Cuties’
Look what just hit the Internet — the Tichel Cuties (tichel being the scarf that traditionally observant Jewish women wear over their hair once they are married) singing a kosher version of some Lady Gaga songs. Well, it may be kosher, but it’s not so innocent. The sexual overtones — not to mention some of…
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