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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If You Agree With Me, Then You Are Right
[ ![][2]][2] It has recently come to my attention that you’ve got some disagreements with me about the issues. In a series of letters to the editor, you’ve suggested that my logic is flawed, that I’m ill-informed about issues, that I misrepresent facts and that my knowledge of history is thin at best. These are…
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I. B. Singer’s Secret Hispanic Meydl
[ ![][2]][2] A newly-discovered hand-written letter written in Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer to Magdalena Salazar, his Mexican maid of seven years in the Upper West Side apartment he shared with his wife Alma, offers insight into a previously unknown romantic liaison by the Nobel Prize winner. Stuck to a Zabar’s grocery list which had…
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February 26, 2009
[ ![][2]][2] Hope For Israel Dear Backward, I always love to turn to your Arts & Culture pages. In a world where everything is so uncertain and life can sometimes seem so cheap, it makes me proud to be a Jew. Benjy Netanyahu Jerusalem, Israel Winter Olympic? Dear Backward, After my Bar Mitzvah in October…
The Latest
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Drawing on Hitler’s Book
On the way to the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco where Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf opened on February 11 for a five-month run, a cranky neighborhood in my mind muttered, “History is bunk.” Then I remembered that the phrase was coined by Henry Ford, the carmaker and antisemite, and I was tossed…
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Un-Righteous Indignation
For a columnist, there’s no such thing as a bad reaction. Agreement feels good, of course, but disagreement is better than apathy, and bitter disagreement means, at the very least, that one’s managed to say something. Thus, over the past few months, I’ve relished the opportunity to engage with smart critiques of my opinions on…
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Do Islamic Leaders Mean What They Say?
Jihad and Genocide By Richard L. Rubenstein Rowman & Littlefield, 260 pages, $59.95. Richard L. Rubenstein, my doctoral advisor, first rose to prominence with his path-breaking 1966 book, “After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism.” Improperly regarded as the Jewish contribution to the then fashionable “death of God debate,” it argued that no theology could…
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Natural-Born Storyteller
‘Irving was a natural-born storyteller. He had a flair for telling movie stories, and he knew about the medium — more than most writers knew.” Quite a compliment, from no less than Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood and Broadway’s greatest writers. What makes Hecht’s praise unusual is that he said it not of a fellow…
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The Shlemiel as Experimental Mensch
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s tales are never quite what they seem, and the musical “Shlemiel the First,” adapted from a play that Singer based on his Chelm stories, is no exception in providing surprising depths. Who but Singer could make adultery (at least the characters think it’s adultery) seem so innocent? After the final curtain call…
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‘Ai No Corrida’ Sidney Franklin, the Brooklyn Bullfighter
Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway’s Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin By Bart Paul University of Nebraska Press, 336 pages, $29.95. The concept of a Jewish bullfighter from Brooklyn seems, like that of a Jewish pirate, exotic beyond all probability. Yet Sidney Franklin, born Sidney Frumpkin in Park Slope in 1903 to a…
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Deep Panning
Dick Luxner sent me an e-mail in which he inquires whether I know anyone who can read 16th-century Catalan (I don’t), and ended with the P.S.: “Can you confirm my thought that the ‘pan’ in the phrase I remember from my childhood, ‘Wipe that smile off your pan,’ comes from the Yiddish word for face,…
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February 26, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Chandelier-maker Jacob Greenthal, known in the saloons of the Manhattan’s West Side as “Mike the Jew,” is in critical condition after being stabbed multiple times by a group of unknown assailants. The lone witness, a taxi driver who was threatened by the gang of attackers, told police that he…
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