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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A Doctor Without Borders
Rick Hodes cures sick African kids. With a reassuring manner and a brightly colored hat (bearing the Amharic words “peace” and “health”) the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s medical programs in Ethiopia treats the crippled and cancerous, the diseased and debilitated, the invisibly infirm and the grotesquely malformed children of Addis Ababa….
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Books Preferring SS Officers to Beach Boys: George Steiner versus Emil Cioran
Gallimard has just published, in Paris, George Steiner’s “Lectures. Chroniques du New Yorker,” a translation of the 2009 New Directions collection, “George Steiner at The New Yorker.” Steiner is notorious for his rabid anti-Zionism and his peculiar 1981 novella “The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.,” a portrait of Adolf Hitler which some call…
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Delmore Schwartz: Diminished Responsibility and Literary Genius
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories Delmore Schwartz New Directions, 1978. 202 pages. Delmore Schwartz was a poet first and foremost, and an important one, but his short stories—a valuable selection of which are collected in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories—aren’t too shabby themselves. Concerned for the most part with sensitive young…
The Latest
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Gefilte Fish: Bibi and ’Bama’s Latest Fight
With No Apology! On January 25, 1991, in an article titled ‘With Apologies,’ Philologos answered a letter asking about the phonetic similarity of English and Hebrew pronouns. Explaining how these and other similarities were coincidental, Philologos found fertile ground for other, related linguistic observations. Nearly 20 years (1,001 weeks) have passed and below begins the…
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April 9, 2010
100 Years Ago In The Forward The meat boycott that has engulfed New York City has really heated up. After a dramatic increase in the price of kosher meat, women, worried they won’t be able to stretch their husband’s wages to provide their families with food, have organized boycotts of local butchers. The women manning…
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Grossed Out, Or Remembered At Last?
The Complete Milt Gross: Comic Books and Life Story Edited by Craig Yoe IDW Publishing, 386 pages, $39.99 Three or four generations ago, humorist Milt Gross was so famous that to avoid him and his work would have been almost impossible — especially for Jewish readers, some of whom must have winced, while others laughed…
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A Director’s Director
Kazan on Directing By Elia Kazan, edited by Robert Cornfield Alfred A. Knopf, 368 pages, $30.00 As Elia Kazan wrote in preparation for a book on his craft, a director should “avoid being a nice guy, a decent guy, a conforming guy.” He should show no shame when accused of being arrogant, and he should…
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Middle East Politics Beyond Cohen’s Grasp
Beyond America’s Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East By Stephen P. Cohen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $27 The only thing arguably more horrible than events in the Middle East is how large elements of Western academia, and sometimes the media, present the region. The other day, I remarked to…
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Please Don’t Turn Off Your Cell Phones
Sometimes, the world turns gratifyingly upside down. At most theater performances, you’re expected to remain silent and immobile, as if the fourth wall had never been breached or experimented with. You’re meant to take in the meaning or aesthetics of the dance or drama, and only later proffer opinions, analyses and critiques. Rarely, if ever,…
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The Prophetic Delmore Schwartz
Even if it is in David Mamet’s sense of a “lapsed Talmudist,” my method of reading is Talmudic. When I read, I ask myself, and the text in hand, endless questions, questions that often engage with the various texts I’ve read over the years. This hypertextual mess sometimes clogs up the margins of my books…
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Bleak Louse
In Noah Baumbach’s new film, “Greenberg,” Ben Stiller plays the title character (whose first name is Roger), a former 1990s rock band front man who has become an adult chronologically, but obstinately refuses to do so in any other way. His band never took off — he sabotaged the record deal offered to him 15…
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