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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February 19, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward David and Anna Saltz lived with their eight children in Greenville, Miss., where they ran a shoe store. Down the street was a custom tailor shop, where 19-year-old Abie Glassman worked. Right under David’s nose, Glassman and 45-year-old mother of eight Anna commenced an affair. Although the affair seemed…
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Compelled to Suffer
Opening night of Rinne Groff’s “Compulsion” at the Yale Repertory revealed a play still finding its feet. Derived from the life of Meyer Levin, who tried unsuccessfully to bring his adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary to the stage, “Compulsion” tells the story of Sid Silver, a writer who met with Otto Frank about Anne’s diary…
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Friction Where Heaven Meets Earth
Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade Edited by Oleg Graber and Benjamin Z. Kedar University of Texas Press, 412 pages, $75. This book of authoritative essays, artwork and photographs is a labor of scholarly love that, through the joint intellectual efforts of Jewish, Muslim and Christian scholars, brings down to earth the heavenly…
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Sundance Ends, Sobered by "A Film Unfinished"
The Sundance Film Festival, the premier showcase for independent films ended on January 31. It had screened 117 potential masterpieces in ten packed days with some 45,000 film enthusiasts in attendance. The films covered a vast array of subjects from every genre and with styles from carefully traditional to extremely avant-garde. There were humorous films,…
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Books And Dylan Saw That It Was Good
Children’s books written by celebrities are pretty conventional these days. So it’s strange that Bob Dylan — who’s gotten nothing if not weirder over the past few years — is publishing one. But in reality, Dylan’s latest children’s book was already written, back in 1979. According a recent press release, “Man Gave Names to All…
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Afropoptastic
In 1985, after wearing out a cassette of the Boyoyo Boys’ song “Gumboots,” Jewish singer/songwriter Paul Simon flew to South Africa to record “Graceland.” Nowadays, magnetic tape may seem antiquated, but 25 years later, American Jewish artists are still drawing heavily on African popular music. Afropop, encompassing genres as varied as the Afrobeat pioneered in…
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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…
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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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