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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Was It Pushed Or Did It Fall?
Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment By Stephen Kotkin, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross Modern Library, 197 pages, $24 There is no Freedom Without Bread: 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism By Constantine Pleshakow Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 289 pages, $26 In the cascade of nostalgic…
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Memories Of the Fall
The buses waited in the synagogue lot. There was already an argument. One mother said the buses shouldn’t idle, it was bad for breathing. For Joseph, her Joey’s asthma. Another father said it was okay. Don’t make them turn off the buses then turn them back on. We were waiting for two more families. The…
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Hi, Harvey! How’s It Going?
Hi, readers! If I’ve never addressed you that way in the past, it’s because until a few years ago, no one started a written English communication by hi-ing anyone. If you were writing a letter to someone named Harvey Rosenblum, you would begin it, if you wished to be formal, “Dear Mr. Rosenblum.” If you…
The Latest
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Bible: New, Improved
A Literary Bible By David Rosenberg Counterpoint, 696 pages, $35.00 Even if you are unfamiliar with the poet David Rosenberg and his curiously slack biblical “translations,” the ideological premises of his new collection, “A Literary Bible,” will be immediately clear. His polemics, after all, are repeated in a preface, an epilogue, an afterword and chapter…
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Driving Home a Reality Check
I’ve seen Philip Levine’s face on the back cover of his books, and once in a while, on podiums at readings. When I saw him two feet away, in an NYU bathroom of all places, I was totally baffled. “That’s Philip Levine!” I exclaimed, my voice echoing through the stalls. To which the poet answered:…
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The Quantum Leaps of an American Jewish Physicist
The American Jewish physicist and journalist Jeremy Bernstein, born in 1929 in Rochester, New York, has just produced a delightfully discursive, digressive semi-memoir, “Quantum Leaps,” just out from Harvard University Press. Bernstein’s father, Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, a fixture for almost a half century at Temple B’rith Kodesh outside Rochester, left an unpublished memoir among…
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Performance Art From Behind the Iron Curtain
A new exhibit at The New York Public Library for the Performing Art — “Revolutionary Voices: Performing Arts in Central & Eastern Europe in the 1980s” — brings together a vast archive of documents that give texture and depth to the artistic climate of the Soviet Bloc in the 1980s. From scripts covered in censors’…
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Talmud for Today
The Talmud: A Selection Selected, translated and edited by Norman Solomon Penguin Classics, 896 pages, $16.00 By Lawrence Grossman The distinguished Penguin Classics imprint began in 1946 with a translation of “The Odyssey,” and it has published more than 1,300 titles since, under the motto: “The best books ever written.” The inclusion of a volume…
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Books Books Aren’t Born: Writing and Gestating Just Aren’t Comparable
My son, Shai, was born on January 21, 2007 and two days later, in time for our arrival home from the hospital, a heavy cardboard box arrived in the mail. University of Nebraska Press had sent me 20 copies of my first book, “Houses Of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books,” which I had been…
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Darwin and God — for Kids
Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith By Deborah Heiligman Henry Holt and Co., 272 pages, $18.95 Children’s book author Deborah Heiligman has been interested in religion since she was a teenager, majoring in religious studies in college. “When you look at a people and its religion, you’re looking at sociology, psychology, history, anthropology,”…
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Iris Apfel: a Jewish Collector of Great Style
88-year-old Iris Barrel Apfel, born to a Jewish family in Astoria, Queens, has long inspired a fashion world in-crowd with her sharp eye for mixing and matching accessories in serendipitous, joyous ways. A inspired collector and shopper, not a designer, Apfel is being honored with a traveling exhibit of her fashion finds, “Rare Bird of…
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