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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April 23, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Brooklyn’s district attorney has interviewed more than 20 Jewish businessmen who were fleeced by a gang of Jewish horse poisoners. The poisoners were rumored to have bilked more than $30,000 out of dozens of businessmen in Brooklyn and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Currently, three of the horse poisoners…
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A Jewish Frankenstein
In the film “American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” the eponymous subject — denunciator of Israel, conspiracy monger and self-described “Frankenstein” — complains that the “Holocaust has long since ceased to be a source of moral and historical enlightenment.” Well, this surprisingly entertaining new documentary fixes that alleged problem. The Holocaust is the source…
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The Most Beautiful Manners
Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Antisemitism in England By Anthony Julius Oxford University Press, $45 Many years ago, I took a train journey to Birmingham with my father and a non-Jewish business associate whom I will call ‘Arthur’. I was ten or eleven years old at the time, and I would often tag…
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Deborah Gross: Blogger Turned Comedienne
Deborah Gross has so many funny conversations that she began blogging them — verbatim. She teaches people how to use the ATM. Her signature accessory, a family heirloom, gets mistaken for a swastika. And she has cultivated a unique relationship with an employee at the Dunkin’ Donuts she frequents where many of her conversations take…
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The Tarpan Strikes Back
American Jews can be strangely incurious about the actual daily life of their ancestors. This seems to hold especially true for those of Eastern European descent, who see the vast area between Germany and Russia as a giant killing field — thus reducing 1,000 years of culture to two words: “Never again.” I saw this…
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Return of the Story Animals
Despite Yann Martel’s 2001 novel “Life of Pi” making the difficult transition from best-seller to Man Booker Prize winner, acclaim for the book was never universal. Whether because of the book’s plot twist, its childlike animal parable structure, or the taint of plagiarism in Martel’s free admission that he was influenced by “Max and the…
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Cultivating Our Gardens, Ourselves
In a country where Johnny Appleseed is a foundational character — a wellspring of national virtue — it should come as no surprise that Americans set much store by gardening. These days, tending to a private or a community garden is all the rage, as are books about gardening, which thrive on the shelves of…
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Jews on the Altar: MOBIA Exhibition Examines Images on Spanish Altarpieces
Jewish Spain is a world of which many have heard, but few actually know. Popular and even scholarly Jewish discourse is full of rumor and exaggeration, and interpretations of scattered facts vary widely. Since 1992, however, when Spain began a rapprochement with Jews and Judaism on the 500th anniversary of the expulsion, more and more…
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A Blizzard Called Love
Eight White Nights By André Aciman Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 368 pages, $26 ‘Halfway through dinner,” says the unnamed narrator of “Eight White Nights,” “I knew I’d replay the whole evening in reverse.” Thus begins André Aciman’s snow globe of a novel, which attempts to follow up on the success of his debut novel, “Call…
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The Nazi Sympathizers Who Ran American Universities
The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses By Stephen H. Norwood Cambridge University Press, 350 pages, $29 American Jews remember the Ivy League colleges of the 1930s as being places where Jews were not especially welcome. Quotas on Jewish students — the infamous numerus clausus imported from Europe —…
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Daytshmer Nightshmare
Vincent Daly writes from Baltimore: “I’m wondering about the Yiddish word daytshmerish, denoting the Germanified Yiddish used (among other things) for speeches by well-born characters in the early Yiddish theater. Daytsh is clearly Deutsch, i.e., German, and –ish is no problem. But where does the syllable –mer come from?” Daytshmerish is a 19th-century Yiddish word,…
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