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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Fiddler Without a Roof
At the recent Montreal International Yiddish Theatre Festival, Itzik Gottesman of the Yiddish Forward spoke with Shmuel Atzmon, the founder and director of Yiddishpiel Theater in Tel Aviv about the future of Yiddish theater in Israel. A video about Atzmon and his work follows: To watch a recent forward.com video about the Montreal International Yiddish…
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Excerpt: Alice Eve Cohen’s ‘What I Thought I Knew’
Scene 1 Stage Fright This was going to be a solo show. That’s what I do. I write and perform solo plays. Dramatic tales with multiple characters, for adults. Comic plays and folktales, for children. I’ve performed for half a million people, in tiny theaters and high- tech performance spaces, in international theater festivals and…
The Latest
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Taking the A Train to ‘The Fourth Reich’
In 2008, the German city of Munich celebrated its 850th birthday amid much fanfare, and various cultural institutions were asked to mark the occasion. When the recently opened Jewish Museum was approached, it reacted with ambivalence. Indeed, for nearly half the history of Munich — more than 400 years — Jews were excluded from taking…
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Luftmenschen Take to the Airwaves
Station Identification: A Cultural History Of Yiddish Radio In The United States By Ari Y. Kelman University of California Press, 279 pages, $39.95 Now that the exuberantly noisy klezmer revival has joined the cresting domestic use of Yiddish, as well as the rise in academic studies of Yiddish language, literature and culture, it is good…
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Feeding the Body Politic
Long before Americans discovered the virtues of vegetables, these gifts of the soil loomed large on the modern Jewish landscape. Within Jewish circles, “Eat Your Vegetables” was not only the rallying cry of nutrition-minded mothers, but also a Zionist imperative — the stuff of moral regeneration. Adding fruits and vegetables to one’s diet, it seemed,…
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‘We Found a Baby in You’
What I Thought I Knew By Alice Eve Cohen Viking, 208 pages, $24.95 One of the few certainties in Alice Eve Cohen’s life was her infertility, the result of her mother taking the synthetic hormone DES while she was pregnant, before the drug’s potential for fetal damage was widely known. At the age of 44…
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County Fare
Forward reader Donald Allen, having come across a reference in a column of mine several weeks ago to “Kovno *gubernya,” *the czarist province of Kaunas in Lithuania, writes: “When I was growing up, my father, born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1895, always told me that his father and mother were from ‘Givilney gubernya,’ probably close…
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July 17, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Jumping up onto a tabletop in the mess hall of Ellis Island, one of the immigrants yelled out: “No one could eat breakfast today. The food they give us here isn’t fit for pigs. We are treated here like wild animals, kept in cages and given rotting food to…
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From the Kol Israel Orchestra to a Pygmy Choir
If any novelist wrote a tale about a young Israeli orchestral musician who became a world expert on the music of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa, thereby directly influencing Steve Reich, Herbie Hancock and Madonna, readers would deem the story unlikely. Yet this is exactly what happened to the veteran French-Israeli musicologist Simha Arom…
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A Climb, a Crime and a Debut Novel
The Jump Artist By Austin Ratner Bellevue Literary Press, 256 pages, $14.95. On September 10, 1928, a Latvian Jew was bludgeoned to death as he and his son hiked the Tyrolean Alps. The man’s son, Philipp Halsmann, 22 years old at the time, was convicted of the murder and spent the next two years in…
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Allowing the Yetzer Tov To Win
It happens to me every day. Although I know that yoga, meditation, exercise or prayer will make me feel better than updating my Facebook status or grabbing a snack, I have to fight myself to do them. If the yetzer tov (the “good” side) wins and I do my spiritual practice, eventually I won’t remember…
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