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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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…
The Latest
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Building and Breaking Barriers
Facing each other, kneeling on top of a restaurant bar, Ella and Edo slowly begin to dance. YelleB, the dance company, made up of Israeli duo Ella Ben-Aharon and Edo Ceder, is continually exploring new performance spaces, so it is no surprise that at the company’s benefit party a wine bar would be used as…
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Books Our Rack: Némirovsky Bio, Translated Hebrew Fiction, Advice With Lox
Non-Fiction • The newly translated “The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903-1942,” (Knopf) by French writers Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, tells the life story of the author of the posthumous bestseller “Suite Francaise.” The biography covers Némirovsky’s childhood in Russia, her adulthood in her adopted country of France, and her death at Auschwitz. Philipponnat and…
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Books Rejecting Art for Art’s Sake at the Canadian Jewish Book Awards
The New York literary scene may currently be all caught up in Book Expo America, but in Toronto a smaller literary celebration is being held tonight at the Canadian Jewish Book Awards. Among the honorees are Robin McGrath for her Newfoundland-based novel, “The Winterhouse” (Killik Press) David Sax for his book, “Save the Deli” (Houghton…
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Bucky Shvitz
For his latest comic, Eli Valley embraces the genre of hard-boiled detective noir with a hero determined to solve an epidemic of lost identity. Click on the thumbnail to the right for a larger version: Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His column, “Comics Rescued From a Burning Synagogue in Bialystok and Hidden in…
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Born Grumpy, With a Talent for It
Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens Twelve, 448 pages, $26.99 Christopher Hitchens writes best when he writes with disdain. In book-length attacks on Mother Teresa (“The Missionary Position”), The Clintons (“No One Left to Lie To”), and religion (“God is Not Great”), he has shown himself to be an entertaining and erudite polemicist. And though Hitchens is…
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Growing Up Rich
Elliot Allagash by Simon Rich Random House, 240 pages, $23 Simon Rich has it all: He’s very funny (in The New Yorker, writer for “Saturday Night Live”), fairly smart (though he went to Harvard, not Yale) and eternally youthful. He successfully completed a two-book deal from Random House, which he signed before he even left…
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At 101, Director Points His Art at Persecution
It took a 101-year-old Catholic to give Judaism its due at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Manoel de Oliveira, the oldest active director in the world, breathed new life into the ancient issue of persecution in “The Strange Case of Angelica.” Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) may sound like she’s the subject, but the…
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Twice Beware the Aryan Nation
Thinking about Iran and the Bomb the other day (what newspaper reader doesn’t?), it struck me as a curious coincidence that, for the second time in some of our lifetimes, Jews are being threatened with mass destruction in the name of the same ancient Indo-European word. This is because “Iran” and “Aryan” are connected. The…
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