Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Film & TV Lainie Kazan’s ‘Oy Vey’ Moment
Filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky’s “Oy Vey, My Son Is Gay,” slated to be released this fall, offers the exact story line that the title suggests: overbearing Jewish mother from Long Island (Lainie Kazan) hurls eligible Jewish bachelorettes at her nice, but (no-so-secretly) gay son, Nelson (John Lloyd Young). But Nelson is already in a relationship — with…
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Part IV: Writing in My Father’s Footsteps
Prior to the arrival of my father and the first wave of Machalniks in May 1948, the fledgling Israeli army had taken huge losses. These losses weren’t simply because the soldiers were heavily outnumbered, but because the Israeli army had not yet become a unit: It was still a disorganized patchwork quilt of antagonistic freedom…
The Latest
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Do Jews Have a Jesus Problem?
The joke, if that’s what it is, goes like this: “You’ll have to forgive us Jews for being a little nervous. Two thousand years of Christian love have worn down our nerves.” That says it all, doesn’t it? The scars of antisemitism and missionary activity, the pathos-drenched sense of humor, the contempt for Christianity —…
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Crafting Beauty From Despair: Violins of Hope
Soon after landing in Tel Aviv a few years ago, I found myself in the atelier of Amnon Weinstein, a renowned violin maker on Shlomo Hamelech Street. I had come to Israel in search of Jewish partisans, those exceptional individuals who had not only risen up against Hitler in Eastern Europe, but also, soon afterward,…
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And Then There Was “And”
And Poems by Michael Blumenthal BOA Editions, Ltd.,112 pages, $16.00. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith poet Michael Blumenthal. Well, in fact, he nearly saith that. Not quite, but almost. Blumenthal’s new collection of poems, titled “And,” is the closest that the stoicism of Ecclesiastes will come to getting a 21st-century makeover. In it,…
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Sol LeWitt: A Jewish Artist’s Leap Into the Unknown
American Jewish artist Sol LeWitt, recognized as a pioneer in conceptual art and Minimalism, died of cancer two years ago, yet he is as present as ever on today’s museum scene. LeWitt opined in a 1967 issue of Artforum that the “idea or the concept is the most important aspect” of his art, and that…
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Alack and Alas, We’ve Lost Our Glottal Stop
Andy Farber of Terre Haute, Ind., writes to ask, “What does zuchem vey mean?” “Zuchem vey” means nothing that I know of. But what Mr. Farber has undoubtedly heard is a slight garbling of Yiddish *s’iz okh un vey, *an expression that is easy to understand but not so easy to translate into contemporary English….
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May 8, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Oy, if only Mendel Weinstock had taken our advice, everything probably would be okay. Not long ago, 19-year-old Weinstock opined, in a letter to our Bintel Brief advice column, that he had ended up in the hospital as a result of a love affair gone bad. According to the…
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House of Cards
Erin Einhorn’s family folklore reads like delectable fiction. Her grandfather leapt from a moving train bound for a concentration camp to save her mother — then a child — who was hidden by five people in three countries by the time she was 9. In 1945, Einhorn’s grandfather invited a Polish family, the Skowronkis, to…
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Describing a Scribe
On an immediate level, illustrator Arthur Szyk’s (1894–1951) “The Scribe,” painted during his late twenties in Paris, is a confident display of technical mastery. Here’s a young artist who can do ornate, Renaissance illuminations; he can also give you Picasso’s abstraction. Actually, he can give you both at once. This painting, as it turns out,…
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A Utopian Bronx Tale
In the mid-1920s, a group of immigrant Jewish factory workers decided that they’d come this far for something better than the slums they inhabited. So pooling resources, they orchestrated the construction of four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx, with practical goals for a better quality of life, and idealistic visions of…
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