Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Sex and the Shoah, Through Survivor and Sons
‘Death in Love” is both gross and engrossing. The 44-year-old New York-born director of “Remember the Titans,” Boaz Yakin, wrote, produced and directed this Holocaust-related film in a deliberately provocative way. This is the second time that the former yeshiva student has attempted a Jewish subject. “A Price Above Rubies” brought mixed reviews from critics…
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High-Tech and Haimish
Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America By Jeffrey Shandler New York University Press, 341 pages, $75.00. Recently, in pursuit of a story about Christians who have become interested in Judaism, I stumbled across QualityLifeNow, an outreach program organized by a pair of genial Lubavitcher Hasidim. Every Wednesday evening in midtown Manhattan, these…
The Latest
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Stop Talking out of Your Nose
Shelly Jacobson writes: My husband grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family in Brooklyn. Recently, I used the word *fumfah, *thinking this meant someone who made a big or embarrassing error in speech. I didn’t think it was Yiddish — it was just a made-up word to me. But my husband says it definitely is Yiddish…
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Odessa
My father promises me That one day we will Flee the shtetl To Odessa. We will delight in Chocolate shoppes on Baroque squares. We will pass icon-laden Burnt-brown churches Topped by cerulean blue Onion domes. The harbor on the inland sea Filled with tall-masted frigates Will beckon like the Sirens. I will rise above the…
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Offbeat Israel: Sex Gum, Sports and the Separation Wall
Hamas has come up with some pretty bizarre conspiracy theories about Israel, but this one surpasses them all. Israel is bringing aphrodisiac chewing gum in to the Gaza Strip in order to corrupt its residents. Of course, encouraging Gazans to hook up and make more little Gazans is clearly an integral part of Israel’s strategy…
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A Horse! A Horse! My Horse for a Theater!
On cold winter New York nights in the late 1990s, Erez Ziv could be seen driving a horse-driven carriage and smiling as big as the moon. A rare Israeli among the otherwise Irish population, he excelled at the act he performed for tourists seeking romantic turns in the park or through Times Square. Regaling them…
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July 24, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Unemployed worker Harry Rosenthal was hungry and thought it would be easy to lie down in the street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and pretend he was dying of hunger. Police on Elizabeth Street bought his act and had him brought to the station, where he was fed and…
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Unstunned
Brooklyn’s community of Syrian Jews — defensive, insular, affluent and bound by a 75-year-old edict that forces excommunication upon anyone intermarrying — is a big and mysterious subject, one ripe for dramatizing. Zev Chafets’s excellent article about it, “The Sy Empire,” which ran in The New York Times Magazine in 2007, had odd and arresting…
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Einstein and Complex Analyses of Zionism
Judaism Does Not Equal Israel By Marc Ellis The New Press 232 pp. $24.95 Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East. By Fred Jerome. St. Martin’s Press. 334 pp. $25.95 ‘The Arabs have attacked us unexpectedly, wanted to destroy our settlement work, have murdered and plundered,” Chaim Weizmann wrote in…
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Lutz Triumphant
Another Bastille Day passes with fireworks in France, political turmoil in Italy and a romantic comedy topping the American box office. This year, though, the romcom in question is not a grand marnier soufflé of warm, fluffy intoxication but a raw, slightly awkward, pas de deux between a self-obsessed fashion journalist and the klutzy Lutz…
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Women’s Professional Soccer Has a New Jewish Star
Three short-lived seasons of The Women’s United Soccer Association, which folded in 2003, left American fans distraught, but Women’s soccer is trying again. The Women’s Professional Soccer league debuted in April with seven teams, no television deals, and a substantially smaller budget. Some are dubious that it will ever make real money, writing it off…
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