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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February 5, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward In Krakow, a young father took his own life just as the Sabbath was coming to a close. The man, 30-year-old Nossen Ehrlich, was the son of a well-known and successful local businessman. The younger Ehrlich, however, had been stricken by a string of bad luck and never achieved…
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Heads of Clay
The February 2 announcement of the Academy Award nominations will include five nominees for Best Animated Film, instead of the usual three, a testament to the large number of worthy contenders this year (or maybe just the pressure applied by major studios to push their most lucrative product). It means there may be room for…
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Books Forward Favorites for the National Book Critics Awards
The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its annual book awards on Saturday, which include Benjamin Moser’s “Why This World,” a biography of the Brazilian Jewish novelist Clarice Lispector. Born Chaya Lispector in Chechelnik, Ukraine in 1920, Lispector was brought to Brazil as an infant. There she went on to write books such…
The Latest
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Books Too Gross for the 21st Century? Jewish American Cartoonist Milt Gross
On February 7, at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, a new publication from New York University Press, “Is Diss A System? A Milt Gross Comic Reader” edited by Ari Y. Kelman, will be presented. Gross (born in 1895) of Russian Jewish ancestry, drew comic strips of wild slapstick energy, following in the violence-for-laughs tradition…
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Books Taking a Cold Shower in Philip Roth’s Room
Someone on the grounds crew at the Corporation of Yaddo, the artists colony in Saratoga Springs N.Y., has a sense of humor. In the “Breast Room” (so-called because Philip Roth wrote “The Breast” while residing in it) of the West House building, the shower is mislabeled. When one turns the dial from off at the…
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Books Bubby Blurbs
First there were book trailers, then there were Old Jews Telling Jokes, and now, for his forthcoming book “Jew and Improved,” Canadian author and National Post editor Benjamin Errett has combined the two online video genres. To promote Errett’s book, which documents his conversion to Judaism, Errett’s wife (and the book’s illustrator) Sarah Lazarovic created…
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January 29, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Fourteen-year-old Morris Ripkin of 170 Allen Street in New York City, a student at P.S. 35, was arrested and taken into custody after he pulled a revolver on the school’s principal, Emma Sylvester. The principal testified in court that Ripkin was frequently in trouble and hated Sylvester because she…
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Artist in Extremis
Even in self-imposed exile in France, Avigdor Arikha is one of Israel’s best-known artists. He is a master draftsman, a BBC lecturer on art history and a knight of the French Légion d’Honneur. In November, a painting of his library, called “Books,” fetched $134,000 at Sotheby’s annual New York auction of Israeli artists. So it…
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Red Devils
UTOPIA OR AUSCHWITZ: GERMANY’S 1968 GENERATION AND THE HOLOCAUST By Hans Kundnani Columbia University Press, 374 Pages, $27.50 One morning in November 1969, a homemade bomb was discovered inside a Berlin Jewish community center, only a day after the center hosted a commemoration of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms. At first glance, circumstances suggested neo-Nazis were…
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Don’t Throw Stones
THE GLASS ROOM By Simon Mawer Other Press, 405 pages, $14.95 A rich young couple hire a star architect to build them a dream house with a living room made of glass. High on newlywed bliss and the envy of their neighbors, they view their home as “a kind of perfection, the finest instrument for…
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Short Cuts Jaffa
From Australian animation (“Mary and Max”) to a restored print of 1935 Yiddish cinema (“Bar Mitzvah”), the 19th New York Jewish Film Festival is a veritable international smorgasbord of movies. Among the offerings, “Ajami” — also in sneak preview at the Boston Jewish Film Festival — is worth taking time to savor at the cinematic…
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