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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Failing in the Golden Land
Recently, Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History announced the creation of a Jewish Hall of Fame, inviting nominations from the public at large. Not surprisingly, those who received the nod and will eventually inhabit this hallowed roster of notables consist of the usual suspects: Irving Berlin and Barbra Streisand, Louis Brandeis and Albert Einstein….
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Poetry in a Time of Revolution
Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution By Kenneth B. Moss *Harvard University Press, 408 pages, $39.95. * By early 1917, the Russian Empire was going up in flames. In the dark and cold Petrograd winter, bread shortages and other bitter wartime conditions resulted in demonstrations, strikes and mutiny by Tsar Nicholas II’s troops. That February,…
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Black (Jewish) History Month Is Off and Running
Angelina Jolie may have changed the public face of adoption, but she hasn’t changed the nature of adoption itself. Growing up knowing that the people who biologically made you gave you away is inescapably haunting. For many adoptees, this strange dislocation remains deep in the background. Few outward signs of adoption, the love of a…
The Latest
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Colonies and Conversion
The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe By Jonathan Boyarin University of Chicago Press, 208 pages, $32.50. Some years ago, on a lovely fall morning, I was walking across the Columbia University campus when I saw a group of students unfurl a huge banner that announced “Columbus=Hitler.” Since, at the time,…
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The Cartoons That Disappeared
The Cartoons That Shook the World By Jytte Klausen Yale University Press, 240 pages, $35.00 ‘What are you reading?” my 8-year-old daughter asked me as I sat with Jytte Klausen’s “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” on my lap. “A book about cartoons,” I said. She looked at me, puzzled, and asked: “Where are the…
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A Toast to ‘Coasties’: Regarding an Ethnic Slur in Wisconsin
Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe, a writer and blogger on Yiddish and Yiddish-related subjects and the author of “Yiddish for Dog & Cat Lovers,” has sent out a group e-mail of which I am a recipient. It’s about the word “coastie,” a term for a fashion-conscious female Jewish undergraduate that has been circulating on and beyond the…
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The Last Nazi Hunter
Known as “the last Nazi hunter,” Efraim Zuroff is more properly described as the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem and coordinator of Nazi war crimes research worldwide for the Wiesenthal Center. Awarded a Croatian state decoration by President Mesić on February 1, Zuroff was recently in the Forward studio to discuss…
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February 12, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Police have arrested two seasoned criminals, Harry Meyers and Morris Zingenheimer, for the recent murder of New York City businessman Moses Gootman. Meyers, known as “The Chicago Kid” for having pulled off a major heist in that city, is also known for having been caught robbing apartments in a…
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The Jewish Elvis, Anthropologist
“Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that so much of the way we think about African-American history emerges from the work of a white person of Jewish heritage” suggests Harvard University historian Vincent Brown in the Public Broadcasting Service’s documentary “Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness,” first shown on February 2. He then proceeds to explain….
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Books Harry Houdini Escapes from the Library of Congress
The great escape artist Harry Houdini may have been finally done in by a well-aimed punch to the gut, but his spirit endures. And not just because of the yearly séance, either. Besides being the “Handcuff King and Jail Breaker,” Houdini was also a prolific author. Now, the entirety of The Harry Houdini Collection from…
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Toward a Greener Judaism
A few weeks before taking up her new post as executive director of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, Sybil Sanchez moved from Queens to the Bronx. She decided to make it an environmental move as well. That meant gathering boxes from local stores, opting out of excessive packaging and giving her old…
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