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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Ferber and Kaufman: Jewish Playwrights, Family Creators
The 1920s Algonquin Round Table of New York wits seems to have left little behind of permanent value, apart from a load of tired put-downs and other wisecracks. Yet the works of two members, George S. Kaufman (1889-1961), from a Pittsburgh Jewish family, and his writing colleague Edna Ferber (1885 – 1968) born in Kalamazoo,…
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Books S. An-sky: More Than Just ‘The Dybbuk’
Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions Eugene M. Avrutin, ed. Brandeis University Press University Press of New England 2009; 228 pages $39.95 For frenziedly creative polymaths, the French may have Jean Cocteau, but the Jews have Belarus-born Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport, who wrote poems, fiction, ethnography and plays under the pen name…
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Where the Wild Things Aren’t
Turns out it’s not for kids. But adults will love this movie. Not only for capturing the subtlety of the original 10 sentences of Maurice Sendak’s book, but also for tackling the thorny issues of absent fathers and depression through a child’s unsullied eyes. “Where the Wild Things Are,” the movie, opens with a snowball…
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Art The ‘Schmatta’ Business — on HBO
“Schmatta: Rags To Riches To Rags,” a documentary about the rise and decline of New York’s garment district — and the efforts to preserve what remains of a sector that played a vital role in the American Jewish experience during the past century — premieres October 19 on HBO. Its director, Marc Levin, recently sat…
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Kasztner: Hero or Devil?
Gaylen Ross’s splendid new documentary, “Killing Kasztner,” comes at a time when a new generation of Israelis is rediscovering a forgotten conflict, one that threatened to tear apart Israeli society in the 1950s. Until recently Rudolf Yisrael “Rezso” Kasztner had been the forgotten person in Israel. An ironic and puzzling situation since in the mid…
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How Moses Built America
Fans of Dan Brown’s latest novel, “The Lost Symbol,” may well profit by perusing Bruce Feiler’s new book, which argues that the true secret of American history is not Masonic, but Mosaic. “Moses helped shape the American dream,” Feiler writes toward the end of “America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story.” “He is our true…
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Clearing up the Meshugas for Maureen Dowd and William Safire
Rashi Fein writes from Boston: “In a column in the New York Times on September 30, Maureen Dowd writes that the late William Safire chastised her for her spelling of ‘meshugas’ in the sentence, ‘Cheney & Co. had shoehorned all their meshugas about Saddam’s W.M.D. into Colin Powell’s U.N. speech.’ According to Safire, ‘mishegoss’ would…
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October 23, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward Jewish academics in Austria have been, for a while already, fighting a battle to have Jews recognized as a distinct nationality. This issue originated in the university, where Jewish students from Galicia and Bukovina were required to give their nationalities as Polish or Ruthenian, but then also had to…
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VIDEO: Jewish Communities Reach the Finnish Line
Dina Kantor grew up in Minneapolis to a Jewish father and a Finnish mother who had converted. Her Jewish and Finnish worlds were quite separate but, in 2006, she went to Finland to explore the Finnish Jewish communities of Helsinki and Turku. Originally treating it as part of her MFA program at the School of…
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Music Ending the De Facto Ban on Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’
Growing up I didn’t much think about my wedding. This is not to say I didn’t dream about the man I would one day marry; I did that plenty. But the details — a white tulle dress, a tiered fondant cake — were never part of that revelry. I have stayed true to the girl…
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In the Image of God
The Book of Genesis Illustrated By R. Crumb Norton, unpaged (220 pages, oversized) $24.95 hardback. To say this book is a remarkable volume or even a landmark volume in comic art is somewhat of an understatement. It doesn’t hurt that excerpts of the book appeared during the summer in the New Yorker and that the…
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