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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Written in Stone
American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone By D.D. Guttenplan Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 592 pages, $35.00. When only 33, D.D. Guttenplan took on a courageous endeavor that would overwhelm him for the next two decades: He set out to write a substantive biography about the legendary maverick journalist I.F. Stone, a man…
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Photographs That Are Deserved
French-Jewish photographer Willy Ronis, born in 1910, has never been more popular. Honored at a special exhibit at this summer’s Rencontres d’Arles photography festival on view in Southern France until September 14 (alongside such counterculture stars as America’s Nan Goldin), Ronis has recent books out from a flurry of international publishers, including Taschen, Phaidon, Gallimard…
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Telling Tales of Sick People
There probably are many medical conditions that you and I never hear of prior to learning about them from the media, but I doubt whether any has ever been behind a public riot before, let alone several days of rioting, such as broke out in mid-July in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Me’ah She’arim. You may…
The Latest
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The Celtic Jewish Connection
You can love Irish songs, and you can love Yiddish songs. Irish chanteuse Susan McKeown and Klezmatics bandleader Lorin Sklamberg encourage you to love them both — at once. Why choose? On their CD “Saints & Tzadiks,” (World Village), out August 11, they sing Yiddish, Irish, and blends of Yiddish and Irish — highlighting the…
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Extend the Vote – Don’t Lock Out American Jews
The gates of acknowledgment are closing on Jewish Americans, but it’s time to kick them back open. The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia has recently announced an online vote on who will appear in a multimedia exhibit of the museum’s Only in America Gallery set to open in 2010. Voting and nominations…
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Israelis (And Other Jews) at The Hollywood Bowl
Even at the Hollywood Bowl, classical music rarely gets showier than it did July 28, when the Israeli percussion duo PercaDu, consisting of Tomer Yariv and Adi Morag (both born in 1976), joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic under guest conductor Marin Alsop in a performance of “Spices, Perfumes, Toxins!” by locally based Israeli composer Avner…
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Music Madonna On The Hidden World: From Material Girl to Queen Esther
In her first of what she promises will be a regular column for Yediot Ahronot Madonna has explained how she was turned on to Kabbalah. She notes how her fame and global traveling hadn’t helped “when it came to trying to understand why people suffered in the world or what the meaning of life was…
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August 7, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward Two sisters, 18- and 19-year-old Rebecca and Annie Abrams, were sitting in a Philadelphia park, relaxing and talking with a friend, when suddenly they were attacked by a group of hobos. Although there were numerous people milling about, no one offered help when the Abrams sisters called out for…
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Superbad
Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-creator Joe Shuster Edited by Craig Yoe, with an Introduction by Stan Lee Abrams ComicArts, 160 pages, $24.95. Who knew that Joe Shuster (1914-1992), the Cleveland Jewish teenage artist of the Depression Era, rising from obscurity through his portrayal of The Man of Steel, would become in later…
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Let’s Talk About Sex
The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism Edited By Danya Ruttenberg New York University Press, 320 pages, $19.95. Jewish attitudes about sex and sexuality span a wide spectrum. For liberal Jews, sex and religion may seem unrelated; for those who follow the family-purity laws, the relationship between sex and Jewish tradition may seem set in stone….
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Excerpt: Brigid Pasulka’s ‘A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True’
The pigeon was not one to sit around and pine, and so the day after he saw the beautiful Anielica Hetmanska up on Old Baldy Hill, he went to talk to her father. The Pigeon’s village was two hills and three valleys away, and he came upon her only by Providence, or “by chance,” as…
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