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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Books
J.D. Salinger, Reclusive Author, Rabbi’s Grandson, Is Dead at 91
J.D. Salinger, a grandson of a rabbi and an author whose fiction has held the deep affection of generations of readers, died January 27 at age 91. So extreme was the reclusion of the author, who wrote such books as “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Franny and Zooey,” that there will be no funeral…
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Books Stanford Hogs the Rohr Prize
Two Stanford PhDs — Kenneth Moss and Sarah Abrevaya Stein — have shared the latest Sami Rohr Prize. In a move the committee has characterized as “unprecedented” (i.e. they didn’t do it the one other time they awarded the non-fiction prize) the top prize has been shared and the second prize scrapped. What goes unmentioned…
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Deluded and Derailed
A young mother in Paris chopped off her hair, slashed open her clothes and took herself to a police station, where she claimed that she and her baby had been victims of a verbal and physical antisemitic attack. The surge of real antisemitic attacks in France and the twist that this young woman — known…
The Latest
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A Light Onto a Long, Dark Night
A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad By Robert Wistrich Random House, 1,184 pages, $40 In 1974, Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League authored “The New Anti-Semitism,” one of their series of rather lurid books that were basically collections of ADL memoranda on right-wing antisemitic thugs and acts. The…
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A Moment Fell Like a Star
Can a literature die with a man? When White Russian-born Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever died in Tel Aviv on January 20 at the age of 96, this may be what happened. Sutzkever was the last great living Yiddish writer, and though it is not inconceivable that he may have successors, this does not seem very…
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‘A Tango Between God and Satan’
The odd Eurovision Song Contest win aside, the post-1948 Israeli popular music scene was an insular one for decades, appealing little to Diaspora Jews, let alone the wider world. Yet once the irresistible tide of globalized mass media struck Israel in the 1980s and ’90s, Israeli music became enriched by a host of local subcultures…
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A Brutal Narcissist: The Life of Feminist Icon Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles By Panthea Reid Rutgers University Press, 464 pages, $34.95. Tillie Olsen’s raw and emotionally charged story “I Stand Here Ironing” was a public revelation of the private and isolating pain of the modern mother. Her exposure of the overwhelming love and frustration, the hope and desire, the anger and…
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The Bottom Line
“So how do you get on with other cartoonists? I mean, isn’t it rare for an Israeli cartoonist to be a right-wing religious settler?” It was a fair question. More than 80 educators from San Francisco had been listening to and looking at the work of Shay Charka and were both impressed and disturbed. Charka’s…
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The Greening of Art
Global warming, energy shortages, the fragility of the natural world — these issues are no longer relegated to the fringes of culture. Jewish “eco-artists,” as they are called, have increasingly stepped into activist roles to provoke people’s thinking about the environment. “I’m very conscious of living during an age of excess,” says New York eco-artist…
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The Environment in Spiritual Crisis?
Climate activists are banding together, claiming that December’s United Nations Summit on Climate Change was a turning point in the movement for climate action, which has taken a small group of insiders and is turning it into a grass-roots global juggernaut. More than 20,000 NGO representatives registered for the Copenhagen summit, and many stood outside…
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Fruits of the Desert On a Table Near You
Even the most devoted locavores have their limits. While eating seasonal, locally grown food can be rewarding, both ecologically and culinarily, there are certain dietary staples that one just cannot find at North American farmers’ markets or through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Like coffee. Or chocolate. Or that all-important ingredient of healthy cooking:…
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