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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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…
The Latest
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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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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…
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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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