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
Taking a Cold Shower in Philip Roth’s Room
Someone on the grounds crew at the Corporation of Yaddo, the artists colony in Saratoga Springs N.Y., has a sense of humor. In the “Breast Room” (so-called because Philip Roth wrote “The Breast” while residing in it) of the West House building, the shower is mislabeled. When one turns the dial from off at the…
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Books Bubby Blurbs
First there were book trailers, then there were Old Jews Telling Jokes, and now, for his forthcoming book “Jew and Improved,” Canadian author and National Post editor Benjamin Errett has combined the two online video genres. To promote Errett’s book, which documents his conversion to Judaism, Errett’s wife (and the book’s illustrator) Sarah Lazarovic created…
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January 29, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Fourteen-year-old Morris Ripkin of 170 Allen Street in New York City, a student at P.S. 35, was arrested and taken into custody after he pulled a revolver on the school’s principal, Emma Sylvester. The principal testified in court that Ripkin was frequently in trouble and hated Sylvester because she…
The Latest
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Artist in Extremis
Even in self-imposed exile in France, Avigdor Arikha is one of Israel’s best-known artists. He is a master draftsman, a BBC lecturer on art history and a knight of the French Légion d’Honneur. In November, a painting of his library, called “Books,” fetched $134,000 at Sotheby’s annual New York auction of Israeli artists. So it…
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Red Devils
UTOPIA OR AUSCHWITZ: GERMANY’S 1968 GENERATION AND THE HOLOCAUST By Hans Kundnani Columbia University Press, 374 Pages, $27.50 One morning in November 1969, a homemade bomb was discovered inside a Berlin Jewish community center, only a day after the center hosted a commemoration of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms. At first glance, circumstances suggested neo-Nazis were…
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Don’t Throw Stones
THE GLASS ROOM By Simon Mawer Other Press, 405 pages, $14.95 A rich young couple hire a star architect to build them a dream house with a living room made of glass. High on newlywed bliss and the envy of their neighbors, they view their home as “a kind of perfection, the finest instrument for…
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Short Cuts Jaffa
From Australian animation (“Mary and Max”) to a restored print of 1935 Yiddish cinema (“Bar Mitzvah”), the 19th New York Jewish Film Festival is a veritable international smorgasbord of movies. Among the offerings, “Ajami” — also in sneak preview at the Boston Jewish Film Festival — is worth taking time to savor at the cinematic…
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A Tree Grows in Zion
Forward reader Marvin Polonsky writes: “I sing in a Jewish chorus that is rehearsing some early Yiddish and Hebrew songs of the halutzim,* the first Zionist pioneers. In one of the Yiddish songs are the lines, **Got, got, groyser got,/Lomir davenen minkhe./Az yidn veln forn keyn eretz-yisroyl,/Vet zayn sosn vesimkhe. Lomir davenen minkhe seems to…
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A Book by Its Cover
I knew there were a lot of “Holocaust-related memoirs” but how oft-rehearsed the genre was I learned only when I added to it. Born in Vienna in 1938 and a fleeing infant refugee just seven months later, I am a prime example of a demographic that is determined to tell its story while it still…
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A Casanova of Causes
KOESTLER: THE LITERARY AND POLITICAL ODYSSEY OF A TWENTIETH-CENTURY SKEPTIC Michael Scammell Random House, 689 pages, $35 In 1925, Arthur Koestler, a 20-year-old Hungarian journalist, began to believe that politics was “above all futile” — and that there was “more truth” in philosophy. Zionism, he thought, was the field where he could get the most…
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Conflict and Compromise: Day School Parents Weigh In
Last year, I published an essay on MyJewishLearning.com called “Seize the Day School.” I worried about this essay. “Seize” spelled out, in great detail, my own ambivalences — note the plural — about sending my daughter to Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston. I feared that once the piece was published, her teachers might…
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