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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Playing in Mali
Jeremiah Lockwood just returned from a trip to the West African nation of Mali with his band, The Sway Machinery. The band performed at the Festival au Desert and recorded an album with Malian guest artists. Americans grow up hearing “Timbuktu” used to mean the most remote place in the world. Though readily reachable these…
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Putting the Id in Yid
Forward reader Ben Warwick wants to know why the Yiddish words for a Jew and for Yiddish, yid and yidish, are often spelled with an initial alef rather than an initial yod, so that they appear in print as id and idish. This is something I myself have often wondered about. Now, under Mr. Warwick’s…
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Archivists and Art
ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN ARCHIVISTS HONORED BY SCONE FOUNDATION “Without the pain of primary research, we would remain hostage to ill-informed writers or authorities,” said Stanley Cohen, founder of the Scone Foundation, at the January 25 presentation of the foundation’s Archivist of the Year award, held at the CUNY Graduate Center at Fifth Avenue and 34th…
The Latest
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Books Jewish Impostors, Past and Present
Although Shabbetai Zevi naturally gets most of the attention, Jewish history has been marked by a series of impostors. On February 16, Bloomsbury USA publishes a collection by the late New Yorker reporter St. Clair McKelway, “Reporting at Wit’s End,” which includes the complete 1968 book “The Big Little Man from Brooklyn” about the Jewish…
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Books An Arabic Bestseller About Beirut’s Jews
A new book, documenting Lebanon’s largely vanished Jewish community is a bestseller — in Arabic. In fact, “Wad Abu Jamil,” a book by BBC journalist Nada Abdelsamad named after the formerly Jewish neighborhood in Beirut, is available only in Arabic, though translations into English and French are forthcoming. According to Alexandra Sandels of the LA…
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February 19, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward David and Anna Saltz lived with their eight children in Greenville, Miss., where they ran a shoe store. Down the street was a custom tailor shop, where 19-year-old Abie Glassman worked. Right under David’s nose, Glassman and 45-year-old mother of eight Anna commenced an affair. Although the affair seemed…
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Compelled to Suffer
Opening night of Rinne Groff’s “Compulsion” at the Yale Repertory revealed a play still finding its feet. Derived from the life of Meyer Levin, who tried unsuccessfully to bring his adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary to the stage, “Compulsion” tells the story of Sid Silver, a writer who met with Otto Frank about Anne’s diary…
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Friction Where Heaven Meets Earth
Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade Edited by Oleg Graber and Benjamin Z. Kedar University of Texas Press, 412 pages, $75. This book of authoritative essays, artwork and photographs is a labor of scholarly love that, through the joint intellectual efforts of Jewish, Muslim and Christian scholars, brings down to earth the heavenly…
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Sundance Ends, Sobered by "A Film Unfinished"
The Sundance Film Festival, the premier showcase for independent films ended on January 31. It had screened 117 potential masterpieces in ten packed days with some 45,000 film enthusiasts in attendance. The films covered a vast array of subjects from every genre and with styles from carefully traditional to extremely avant-garde. There were humorous films,…
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Books And Dylan Saw That It Was Good
Children’s books written by celebrities are pretty conventional these days. So it’s strange that Bob Dylan — who’s gotten nothing if not weirder over the past few years — is publishing one. But in reality, Dylan’s latest children’s book was already written, back in 1979. According a recent press release, “Man Gave Names to All…
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Afropoptastic
In 1985, after wearing out a cassette of the Boyoyo Boys’ song “Gumboots,” Jewish singer/songwriter Paul Simon flew to South Africa to record “Graceland.” Nowadays, magnetic tape may seem antiquated, but 25 years later, American Jewish artists are still drawing heavily on African popular music. Afropop, encompassing genres as varied as the Afrobeat pioneered in…
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