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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Too Clever by Half
Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate By Mark Oppenheimer Free Press, 256 pages, $25 Being a smart kid isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be, but it usually pays off in the end. That, at least, is the lesson taught by Mark Oppenheimer in his alternately tender and comic memoir, “Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject…
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The New Face of Yiddish Theater
In 1996, Shane Baker looked like just another New York City cliché: a young gay man, recently arrived in the Big Apple from Kansas City, Mo., waiting tables at Tavern on the Green and planning his entry into the world of New York theater. But Baker’s story was unusual, even for New York. A Yiddish-speaking…
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Spark Flies
Muriel Spark: The Biography By Martin Stannard W.W. Norton & Company, 656 pages, $35 The Scottish novelist Muriel Spark is mostly famous for a single book, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” made into an Oscar-winning film, and for her 1954 conversion to Catholicism. Now, a new biography by Martin Stannard offers fascinating new information…
The Latest
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Barry Knows Jack
Len Amato, head of HBO films, called up director Barry Levinson. “He said, ‘We’ve got this script [by Adam Mazer].’” Levinson said. “I talked to [Amato], and said I was interested.” Levinson is talking on the phone about “You Don’t Know Jack,” about Jack Kevorkian. Known as “Dr. Death,” Kevorkian went to prison in his…
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The Last Philologos Ever?
The announcement in the April 9 issue of the Forward of my 1,000th column took me by surprise because, by my own calculations, the millennium should have come a week later. Perhaps my mistake was failing to count leap years. An extra day every four years may not seem like much, but over a period…
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April 23, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Brooklyn’s district attorney has interviewed more than 20 Jewish businessmen who were fleeced by a gang of Jewish horse poisoners. The poisoners were rumored to have bilked more than $30,000 out of dozens of businessmen in Brooklyn and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Currently, three of the horse poisoners…
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A Jewish Frankenstein
In the film “American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” the eponymous subject — denunciator of Israel, conspiracy monger and self-described “Frankenstein” — complains that the “Holocaust has long since ceased to be a source of moral and historical enlightenment.” Well, this surprisingly entertaining new documentary fixes that alleged problem. The Holocaust is the source…
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The Most Beautiful Manners
Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Antisemitism in England By Anthony Julius Oxford University Press, $45 Many years ago, I took a train journey to Birmingham with my father and a non-Jewish business associate whom I will call ‘Arthur’. I was ten or eleven years old at the time, and I would often tag…
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Deborah Gross: Blogger Turned Comedienne
Deborah Gross has so many funny conversations that she began blogging them — verbatim. She teaches people how to use the ATM. Her signature accessory, a family heirloom, gets mistaken for a swastika. And she has cultivated a unique relationship with an employee at the Dunkin’ Donuts she frequents where many of her conversations take…
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The Tarpan Strikes Back
American Jews can be strangely incurious about the actual daily life of their ancestors. This seems to hold especially true for those of Eastern European descent, who see the vast area between Germany and Russia as a giant killing field — thus reducing 1,000 years of culture to two words: “Never again.” I saw this…
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Return of the Story Animals
Despite Yann Martel’s 2001 novel “Life of Pi” making the difficult transition from best-seller to Man Booker Prize winner, acclaim for the book was never universal. Whether because of the book’s plot twist, its childlike animal parable structure, or the taint of plagiarism in Martel’s free admission that he was influenced by “Max and the…
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