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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Gate to Identity
A Gate at the Stairs By Lorrie Moore 322 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95 In Lorrie Moore’s profound novel, “A Gate at the Stairs,” Gail, the Jewish mother of the half-Jewish protagonist Tassie, metaphorically sits in the dark. She doesn’t loom or pace, or hover and we never learn too much about her, but her…
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April 2, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward The usually sleepy Jewish quarter of Baltimore is in a tizzy after the Forward’s exposure of a racket in the city’s kosher meat industry. Apparently, meat distributors, butchers, rabbis and the heads of the Jewish community were all wrapped up together in a long-term scheme to skim money off…
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Broza Dons Cowboy Boots
At one point during a Writers in the Round concert that took place in Houston in March 1994, Townes Van Zandt gestures at his fellow songwriters — David Broza, David Amram and Linda Lowe — and declares that they are “genuine giant talents!” He did not use the word “we” in that assessment, but most…
The Latest
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Sundry Hungers
On Passover, both our physical and spiritual appetites are honored. So for what do we most deeply hunger? Richard Schiffman, in the following poem and another online, meditates on the often contradictory longings that are at play in a Seder, or a life. Sundry Hungers In the dream, a woman swallowed — one after the…
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What Are We Commanded To Do?
I’ve written a lot of columns since On Language first started appearing in the Forward more than 19 years ago, and as I’ve tried writing a special column for the Seder night each year, I’ve written 19 Seder night columns, too. It’s only natural, then, to have forgotten some of them — and so when,…
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We Are All Simon Schama: The Threat of an Undefined Jew
The Invention of the Jewish People By Shlomo Sand, translated by Yael Lotan Verso, 344 pages, $34.95 It was the year’s biggest helping of humble pie. Less than a month after a heated takedown of Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People” in the Financial Times, the very same reviewer, writing in Italy’s respected…
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Jules Feiffer: A Permanently Enraged Jewish Cartoonist
Backing Into Forward: A Memoir By Jules Feiffer Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 464 pages, $30 At 81, legendary Bronx-born cartoonist Jules Feiffer has accumulated a lifetime of slights, snubs and insults, and he expresses his anger about them all in his recently published autobiography, “Backing Into Forward: A Memoir.” Author of the noir play “Little Murders”…
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Books Chabon and Alter: Is it Esprit d’escalier or Trepverter?
Robert Alter discussed “tough Jews” with Michael Chabon on March 18 as part of the Berkeley Seminars in Modern Jewish Culture Lecture, but there seemed to be a gap in the Jewishness. Alter, the Berkeley professor and great critic of Jewish writing, interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon and asked about the author’s exuberant style, the…
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It’s a Sin
Dramatic adaptations are both a sort of marriage and a kind of alchemy: a mystical merging of two artists to produce a new creation in a different form. This is fitting for Isaac Bashevis Singer, since matrimony and magic both provide subjects for much of his work, including his short story “The Unseen,” which has…
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Books Yiddish on the Psychoanalyst’s Couch: USA vs. France
In the English-speaking world, psychoanalyzing Yiddish, and the way it is spoken, is often done with a dollop of humor, as in “Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods” by Michael Wex, appreciatively reviewed by the Forward. French Jews, on the other hand tend to approach the subject comparatively soberly, as…
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Books The Susan Sontag of the Venetian Ghetto: Sarra Copia Sulam
According to Don Harrán, Sarra Copia Sulam was the first Italian Jewish woman to “excel” as a public literary figure, writing in various forms and leaving a “personal imprint on them.” She was a kind of Susan Sontag of the Venetian Ghetto. Sulam was also prominent because of her beauty and wealth (her husband was…
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