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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Even This Review Is God
Everything Is God: The Path of Nondual Judaism By Jay Michaelson Trumpeter, 304 pages, $17.95. Jay Michaelson is well known to readers of the Forward for his column, “The Polymath,” a title well chosen to mitigate the frequent changes in his byline, which varied from dot-com software designer, to doctoral student in Jewish mysticism, to…
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Drawn to The Beat of a Generation
The Beats: A Graphic History Written by Harvey Pekar, et al. Illustrated by Ed Piskor, et al. Edited by Paul Buhle When Samuel Johnson was asked to join a venture to reprint English poets from Chaucer to the present, most of them major and some minor, it was at first a commercial effort. The London…
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On Adorno On Music
Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962 By Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Wieland Hoban Seagull Books, 492 pages, $29.00. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was a philosopher only after he was a composer, as if the music he made in his youth required an entire system, and a later age, of interpretation. There was a method to…
The Latest
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Why We Don’t Say Shanath Tovath
James A. Goldman writes from Brooklyn: “In this holiday season, I have noticed increasingly that one sees printed ‘Shana Tova’ instead of what I remember as ‘Shanah Tovah,’ even though the latter is more in keeping with the Hebrew orthography, which has a heh at the end of each word. I have also seen the…
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Co Co: Couturier, Collaborator
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel pulled herself up by her bootstraps from her orphanage roots, trading her boots for a pair of two-toned pumps, which she is often credited with popularizing — along with women’s trousers and the little black dress. “Coco Before Chanel,” director Anne Fontaine’s new biopic, starring Audrey Tautou (“Amélie”) in the title role,…
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Music When Jews Were So Cool Arlo Guthrie and Nina Simone Wanted To Sing Israeli Folk Songs
Somewhere in the popular mythology of Jewish paranoia there was a time when everyone loved us. The legend goes that just after the goyim stopped believing we all had horns and just before they started hating Israel for, well, surviving, there was a moment where we were so deeply beloved that black icons, white icons,…
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October 9, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward For each day that has passed during the strike at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company something unusual has happened. The streets surrounding the factory are still filled with police, plainclothes detectives and hired goons. The police threaten the strikers and make arrests without any reason. It looks like a war…
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Hidden Writer Revealed
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife By Francine Prose HarperCollins, 336 pages, $24.99. The diary that Anne Frank so famously kept was found by Miep Gies and given to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, when he alone survived and returned to the secret annex after the war. The published version of those pages was…
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Music Spanish Fly
No one strums more sexuality from a banjo than Dan Saks. And no one squeezes more soul out of a Glockenspiel than Amy Crawford. The duo, two-fifths of Brooklyn-based alt-Sephardi indie band DeLeon, flew through an energetic set on September 24, the gig that started their 18 nights opening for Tropicália psych-rockers Os Mutantes. Too…
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Drawing the Devil Away From Children
As if to raise a curtain on the coming celebration of Maurice Sendak, the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum has unveiled a probing, multidimensional exhibit showing the back story of the children’s author and illustrator, whose “Where the Wild Things Are” is about to open as a major motion picture. Heralded by high-decibel discussion, including…
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Revenge, a Dish Best Served Convincing
Over the summer, much was made in the media of the success of Quentin Tarantino’s Jewish revenge picture, “Inglorious Basterds.” A mix of structural virtuosity and moral and emotional nincompoopery, the film expressed Tarantino’s lip-smacking love of torture, and titillated audiences were delighted by its sadism. Daniel Goldfarb’s similarly themed play, “The Retributionists,” has had…
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