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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Essential Inauthenticity: Narrative Nostalgia Revisited
A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True By Brigid Pasulka *Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 368 pages, $25.00. * A new literary genre has been making waves recently — one that might be called the narrative of nostalgia. Think Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon and Gary Shteyngart, to name just a few authors who,…
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Another Velvet Fog Summer
Mel Tormé (1925–1999) was the Art Tatum of singers: a daredevil improviser with equally flawless chops and remarkable harmonic smarts, he would take a tune and break it down into 1,000 glistening arpeggios, then put it back together in a way that often improved on the original. Like Tatum, he could do all this without…
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The New York Times: Ignorant and Antisemitic?
“Pharisees on the Potomac” is the headline from a July 18 attack by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on what she considers to be the moral hypocrisy — “the ancient political art of Tartuffery,” as she calls it — of Republican Party leaders on Capitol Hill. Let’s stay away from politics. Let’s even stay…
The Latest
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Letting Go of a Dark Thing
Boaz Yakin is the award-winning director of “Fresh” (1994), “Price Above Rubies” (1998) and “Remember the Titans” (2000). His latest film, “Death in Love” — which he not only wrote, produced and directed, but also funded with his life savings — has just been released to mixed reviews. It deals with the psychological traumas that…
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Film & TV ‘Over the Hill’ at 24?
If you’re Orthodox and female and live on the Upper West Side, how old do you have to be to qualify as “over the hill”? “If you’re not married, let’s say, by the age of 24, 25, there’s something wrong with you,” explained one of the talking heads featured in the trailer of J.J. Adler’s…
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Genesis Continues
Those who accuse the French arts world of lacking a moral compass should consider the magnetic north of Ariane Mnouchkine. Her Parisian avant-garde ensemble, Théâtre du Soleil (Theater of the Sun), has just completed a short engagement at New York’s [Lincoln Center Festival]( An invitation that recognized both her current virtuosity and her achievements over…
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‘Zion, Shall You Not Beseech’
The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage By Raymond P. Scheindlin Oxford University Press, 328 pages, $45.00. The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167 – 1900 By Adam Shear Cambridge University Press, 400 pages, $90.00. A heady era of student activism permeated my undergraduate years at McGill University in the early…
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A Bubbling Font of Creativity
Despite its ubiquity, type design is easy to overlook; it’s the meaning of words that usually matters, not their appearance. But for Oded Ezer, an Israeli artist and type designer, typography lends a whole other life to language. In his work, which has appeared in museums and won design competitions worldwide, letters aren’t static symbols…
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July 31, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Tisha B’Av is typically a time when Jews go to cemeteries to remember their dead and to mourn the tragedy of the destroyed Temples in Jerusalem. It was no different this year, when some 5,000 Jews descended on Brooklyn’s Washington Cemetery. But as the mourners stood at their ancestors’…
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Sex and the Shoah, Through Survivor and Sons
‘Death in Love” is both gross and engrossing. The 44-year-old New York-born director of “Remember the Titans,” Boaz Yakin, wrote, produced and directed this Holocaust-related film in a deliberately provocative way. This is the second time that the former yeshiva student has attempted a Jewish subject. “A Price Above Rubies” brought mixed reviews from critics…
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High-Tech and Haimish
Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America By Jeffrey Shandler New York University Press, 341 pages, $75.00. Recently, in pursuit of a story about Christians who have become interested in Judaism, I stumbled across QualityLifeNow, an outreach program organized by a pair of genial Lubavitcher Hasidim. Every Wednesday evening in midtown Manhattan, these…
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