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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The End of Jewish Humor
Uh oh. Judaism is dying. Again. The cover of the June 1 “New York Magazine” is devoted to an article declaring “the end of Jewish humor.” The proof? Woody Allen’s new movie, “Whatever Works,” starring Larry David. Allen and David supposedly represents the last of the old generation of Jewish humor rooted in existential discomfort…
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Offbeat Israel: Why Is the Jerusalem Post Producing the ‘Boringist’ Video?
Israel practiced for war on Tuesday As part of a week of nationwide drills that have taken simulations of wartime civil defense operations to every town and city in the country, bomb sirens sounded at 11 a.m. Civilians, including school and kindergarten children, made their way in to bomb shelters or reinforced rooms, in a…
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Our God and God of our Children?
Contemporary American Judaism: Transformation and Renewal By Dana Evan Kaplan Columbia University Press, 480 pages, $34.50. Orthodox Jews in America By Jeffrey S. Gurock Indiana University Press, 400 pages, $65.00 (hardcover), $24.95 (paperback). Since the end of World War II, Dana Evan Kaplan argues in “Contemporary American Judaism,” “not only have the style and substance…
The Latest
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The Racists Around Us
Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream By Leonard Zeskind Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 672 pages, $37.50. To most Americans, including seasoned political observers, the machinations of white supremacists and professional antisemites are regarded, if at all, as crude carnival theater. After more than three decades…
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Jews in Space
In space no one can hear you scream. But can they hear you kvetch? I’m sitting in a movie theatre, watching the new Star Trek Movie. On screen, a group of Star Fleet recruits, including a Jewish actor or two, climb into a space shuttle and strap themselves in. My eyes wander from neck to…
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Gadding About
Thirty-eight-year-old French-Moroccan Jewish comedian Gad Elmaleh is well on his way to global stardom. His latest film, “Coco,” which opened in Paris last March, is a huge box office hit, and Elmaleh earns kudos not only as an actor, but as writer and director, too. He stars as the title character, a nouveau riche North…
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Darkness Thickens As My Head Changes
If this week’s column strikes some of you as rather technical, you can blame Cantor David Nemtzov of Willowdale, Ontario, for a question he asked about my column of the May 8 issue, in which I pointed out that the Hebrew word *ta’am, *“taste,” is shortened to *tam *in Yiddish by the elision of its…
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And This Is How We Shall Kill You
Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2) By Grigoris Balakian Translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag Knopf, 509 pages, $35.00. Before we learned to say “never again” came our silence. The unheralded attempt to obliterate the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire ushered in the 20th century: a…
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Holy Scriptures Batman! Bible as Comedy
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible! By Jonathan Goldstein Riverhead Books, 256 pages, $15.00. We all know the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah and his ark, but not quite the way Jonathan Goldstein tells them in “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible!” In his latest book, a collection of stories, Goldstein revisits…
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June 5, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward Bootmaker Yekl Chernobelsk is currently thought to be on the lam in Cleveland after it was discovered that he was married to two women simultaneously. Both wives contacted the Forward — and both sent the exact same photograph, along with a list of their demands. His first wife, with…
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Peter Forgacs: Pariah to the People
An avowed outsider, Hungarian artist Peter Forgacs works with photographs and home movies from the first half of the 20th century, editing them and designing ways to enhance their visual and musical appearance so that he can bring them to life and relevance for the 21st century. He is currently working on Col Tempo, his…
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