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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God Lives, but Not in Cambridge
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Random House 416 pages, $27.95. Here is an ambitious novel about big ideas — love, sex, religion — that nevertheless faces these issues with irony and humor. A novel sprinkled with Yiddish and Hebrew, and populated mostly by secular Jews…
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Back to Kovno
This year, the first comprehensive collection of South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer’s nonfiction works will be published. Consistent with a more pervasive silence of her generation, it is unlikely to include more than scant reference to her father’s Lithuanian background. A younger generation of Jewish South African artists of Lithuanian descent, including textile designer…
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Kalanter Banter
An eponym is a word formed from someone’s name. Most languages have them, and English alone has hundreds — some that are clearly so, and others disguised as ordinary-looking words. You don’t have to be an etymologist or a newspaper reader to guess that “Ponzi scheme” probably derives from a man named Ponzi. On the…
The Latest
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January 8, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward More information on “King of the Pimps” Samuel Rogoff has come to light after his recent arrest. Rogoff, who is known on the street as “Sam the Painter,” maintained dozens of apartments, mainly in the Harlem section of Manhattan, that served as brothels. His main partner in crime was…
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The Midas Touch of Hungarian-Jewish architect Ernö Goldfinger
Long derided as a creator of “Brutalist” architecture, the Budapest-born Ernö Goldfinger in 1902 has more recently won respect and even admiration, as two London local councils opted in November 2009 to preserve the low-lying buildings which he designed near his landmark high-rise social housing Trellick Tower itself now a “listed building” of special significance….
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Just Passing Through
Life as a Visitor By Angella M. Nazarian Assouline Publishing, 168 pages, $45.00. Driven by American interest in the Middle East, the past 10 years have produced a slew of memoirs and novels by Iranian émigrés, especially women. Farideh Goldin, in her essay “Iranian Women and Contemporary Memoirs,” attributes this boom to four main factors:…
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132 Years of American Jewish Fiction
It’s not news that Jews tell the same stories over and over again. Anyone who has attended a Simchat Torah celebration knows that when the congregation finally reaches the last sentence of the Torah, they take a deep breath, twirl around a few times, drink a little schnapps, and then, with no further ado, start…
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Ilyas Malayev, Uzbeki Rock Star
In 1992, Bukharian Jewish poet, maqam player and Uzbek rock star Ilyas Malayev immigrated to Queens from Tashkent in Central Asia. When Theodore Levin profiled him for his book, “The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York)” (Indiana University Press, 1997), the forgotten celebrity was sharing a three-room…
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January 1, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Hyman Epstein, the former Brooklyn banker who two years ago absconded with more than $60,000 in depositors? money, has finally been arrested. Admitting his guilt, he said that his conscience would not let him rest and that he is ready to accept whatever the justice system doles out to…
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Greek Jews Remembered: Resilient, Passionate, Variegated
The history of Greek Jews is dizzyingly complex. Comprising both the Greek-speaking Romaniotes and the exiled Sephardim of Thessaloniki, some of whom spoke Ladino, the differing cultures are expertly distinguished in K. E. Fleming’s “Greece: A Jewish History” (Princeton University Press) of which a paperback edition is due this spring, and Steven Bowman’s new “The…
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Song, Dance and Oud
In comparison with some forms of Sephardic culture, Ashkenazic Judaism can come out looking as bland as a gefilte fish that’s lost its horseradish. Not to belittle klezmer, Yiddish or, has v’halila, a good matzo ball, but the inflections of Spanish and Ottoman culture in Sephardic arts render the ordinary exotic for the majority of…
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