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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Where Jewish Women Converse (on Television)
The Sisterhood blog is one forum in which Jewish women of different ages, denominations and political ideologies can debate issues of communal importance. “The Salon,” produced by The Jewish Channel and hosted by Forward editor Jane Eisner with media critic Rachel Sklar, is another. In this newly available episode, the panel — made up of…
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The Jewish Value of Understatement
Modesty and diffidence are not qualities usually associated with American Jewry. In the clothes we wear, the homes we inhabit and, most especially, the synagogues we build, American Jews live large. An artifact of hard-won affluence and an outgrowth of a fiercely guarded sense of belonging, our predilection for conspicuousness happens all the same to…
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Paul Celan’s Letters
Biographers have a vested interest in hyping their subjects, but when Paul Celan’s biographer, John Felstiner, calls the latter “Europe’s most compelling postwar poet,” surely few can argue. Like most books on the Romanian Celan, Festiner’s “Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew” (Yale University Press, 2001) underlines how his wartime experience in a forced-labor camp (while…
The Latest
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The End of Days?
Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson By Elliot R. Wolfson Columbia University Press, 472 pages, $35.00. The Lubavitch branch of Hasidism, known also as Chabad, is the most successful and most controversial movement in American Jewish life. Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson, born in 1902, ascended to the leadership after…
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Raiding the Archive: Bringing Klezmer to the Masses Once Again
It’s a truism of traditional music that in order to go forward, you have to go back. To innovate on old material, you have to know the old material in the first place. But in the case of Yiddish music, there’s often not much to go back to. During the heyday of Yiddish culture in…
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Shedding a Little Light on Sea Monsters and Planets
It was one of the less publicized contests of 2009, and the winners won’t be given any prizes, but there are nonetheless two of them. They are oron and rahav, and they are now the official Hebrew names of the planets Uranus and Neptune, which until now had to be known to Hebrew speakers as,…
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January 15, 2010
100 Years Ago In the Forward It was “he-said, she-said” as the case of Mr. and Mrs. Levine was heard before Judge Whitney in the New York Supreme Court. “You’re a dog and a monster,” was among the printable terms of approbation that Mr. Levine, a lawyer who defended himself, frequently heard from his wife…
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Guileless in Gaza
It is difficult not to be impressed by Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza.” A unique journalistic product, Sacco’s latest book offers an in-depth look at disputed events that took place after the Israelis occupied Gaza at the beginning of the aborted British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. Perhaps these are neglected “footnotes” in the history…
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Engraved on the Unconscious: French Historian Élisabeth Roudinesco on Antisemitism
On a subject where hysteria often seems to reign, a brilliant, well thought-out and balanced new book like “Return to the Jewish Question” (Retour sur la question juive) by the French historian and psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco is a treasure which urgently deserves translation into English. Now 65, Roudinesco, niece of the noted French Jewish feminist…
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Defying Threats and Madoff, the AICF Marches On
Visitors to the America-Israel Cultural Foundation website see bad news and good in anticipation of this year’s gala fundraiser January 10th at Carnegie Hall. The bad news, announced in a banner: “Unfortunately, the bulk of AICF’s endowments were invested with Bernard L. Madoff Securities.” The good news, AICF is one of the few charities to…
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Brutal on the Beach
Israeli choreographer Nir de Volff is one of the most promising newcomers on Berlin’s vibrant dance scene. Early in December 2009, expectations ran high for the premiere of “Maktot,” his dissection of the social complexities of beach culture. His previous creation, a site-specific dance in Berlin’s iconic Neue Synagoge called “Action!” had a successful run…
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