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
On Becoming a ‘Beaner’: A Mexican American Story
‘Mexicans are the scum of the earth,” a student of mine said after being asked to describe the status of the immigrants at her South Carolina high school. She wasn’t menacing. We’ve known each other for years; she knows I’m both Mexican and an immigrant. My student was simply expressing the general view of the…
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Books Found in Portugal: World Famous Jewish-American Novelist
Though he still maintains his accent and caffeinated New York pulse, Richard Zimler is far better known in Portugal, Turkey, Brazil, France and England than in the United States. He may be the world’s most famous unknown living American Jewish writer. In Portugal, he has been the subject of a television documentary, and the same…
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Books Toothy in Gotham
Chronic City By Jonathan Lethem Doubleday, 480 pages, $27.95. ‘Chronic City” initially seemed an important and pleasurable novel to review, just as it must have initially seemed, to Jonathan Lethem, an important and pleasurable novel to write. The ideal reviewer, as if a character in science fiction, relives the writer’s experience word by word, sentence…
The Latest
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Books Immortal Bloodsucking Opportunists
Angel Time: The Songs of the Seraphim By Anne Rice Knopf, 268 pages, $25.95. Anne Rice declared in 2005 in the Author’s Note to her novel “Christ the Lord” that her return to Catholicism meant she would no longer “write anything that wasn’t for Christ.” She professed no more vampires, since they reflected a “world…
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Books Six Takes on God
God According to God: A Physicist Proves We’ve Been Wrong About God All Along By Gerald L. Schroeder HarperOne, 256 pages, $25.99. The Evolution of God By Robert Wright Little, Brown and Company, 567 pages, $25.99. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate By Terry Eagleton Yale University Press, 200 pages, $25.00. Saving…
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Ferber and Kaufman: Jewish Playwrights, Family Creators
The 1920s Algonquin Round Table of New York wits seems to have left little behind of permanent value, apart from a load of tired put-downs and other wisecracks. Yet the works of two members, George S. Kaufman (1889-1961), from a Pittsburgh Jewish family, and his writing colleague Edna Ferber (1885 – 1968) born in Kalamazoo,…
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Books S. An-sky: More Than Just ‘The Dybbuk’
Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions Eugene M. Avrutin, ed. Brandeis University Press University Press of New England 2009; 228 pages $39.95 For frenziedly creative polymaths, the French may have Jean Cocteau, but the Jews have Belarus-born Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport, who wrote poems, fiction, ethnography and plays under the pen name…
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Where the Wild Things Aren’t
Turns out it’s not for kids. But adults will love this movie. Not only for capturing the subtlety of the original 10 sentences of Maurice Sendak’s book, but also for tackling the thorny issues of absent fathers and depression through a child’s unsullied eyes. “Where the Wild Things Are,” the movie, opens with a snowball…
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Art The ‘Schmatta’ Business — on HBO
“Schmatta: Rags To Riches To Rags,” a documentary about the rise and decline of New York’s garment district — and the efforts to preserve what remains of a sector that played a vital role in the American Jewish experience during the past century — premieres October 19 on HBO. Its director, Marc Levin, recently sat…
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Kasztner: Hero or Devil?
Gaylen Ross’s splendid new documentary, “Killing Kasztner,” comes at a time when a new generation of Israelis is rediscovering a forgotten conflict, one that threatened to tear apart Israeli society in the 1950s. Until recently Rudolf Yisrael “Rezso” Kasztner had been the forgotten person in Israel. An ironic and puzzling situation since in the mid…
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How Moses Built America
Fans of Dan Brown’s latest novel, “The Lost Symbol,” may well profit by perusing Bruce Feiler’s new book, which argues that the true secret of American history is not Masonic, but Mosaic. “Moses helped shape the American dream,” Feiler writes toward the end of “America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story.” “He is our true…
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