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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David Grossman: The Language of Significance
When David Grossman made his way to his place on the stage for the two talks that he gave earlier this month — the first as part of the PEN World Voices Festival at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, and the second, a talk about the Polish writer…
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Ivri Lider: On the Verge
Ivri Lider is an Israeli rock star whose fame is beginning to extend beyond the boundaries of his landsmen and language. Lider, who is openly gay, was catapulted into international consciousness with his 2009 cover of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl.” The video of the that cover has since ricocheted around the world on…
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Looking Backward, Dancing Forward
They slap shoes on the stage with gusto, pirouette around them, share them. They roll balls of yarn, play with them, grow tangled in them. They interact with an onstage singer; they respond to live music that in turn responds to them; they form a counterpoint to the abstract paintings projected behind them. Perhaps most…
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There’s No Place Like Home
For a few weeks this month, a dilapidated old medical clinic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side has been full of life, art and visitors. The structure is still that of a medical clinic; Its current tenants, however, have no medical degrees. And although the option to undress for examination remains open to visitors should they…
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Barren Lusciousness
Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch Translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld W.W. Norton & Company, 320 pages, $29.95. Dahlia Ravikovitch, one of Israel’s major poets, played a formative role in both the poetic culture of the state and the undoing of the male dominance in Israeli poetry and…
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Northern Commemoration
The Kaddish prayer is not only a thrice-daily means of memorializing a loved one, but also a literary framework that myriad writers have used for telling their stories of loss, from Leon Wieseltier’s dazzlingly vast “Kaddish” to Ari Goldman’s deeply moving and personal “Living a Year of Kaddish.” In the case of Isa Milman’s “Prairie…
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Ole Man Lobby Jus’ Keeps on Rollin’
Transforming America’s Israel Lobby: The Limits of Its Power and the Potential for Change By Dan Fleshler Potomac Books, Inc., 272 pages, $24.95. Every few years, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee goes too far — at least according to its critics. It bullies the wrong congressman. It steps on the toes of the wrong…
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Splicing Things Up: Forgacs’s Found Film
Showing on five screens upstairs at the Jewish Museum in New York is Peter Forgacs’s stunning video installation The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River. The work premiered in 2002 at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and is the result of a fruitful collaboration between Forgacs and the Labyrinth Project, a group…
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Mayer Before the Nightmare
Born in 1916 in Opatów (Apt in Yiddish), Poland, Mayer Kirshenblatt was 73 when he began to paint, but his pictures have the sunny guilelessness of a peaceful childhood in Poland. They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust, currently at the Jewish Museum in New York,…
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Picturing Exhibition Collectors
A chance encounter at a Parisian cocktail party brought novelist Sara Houghteling together with the woman whose family would serve as the subject of her first novel. Chatting with a lawyer, Houghteling mentioned her work in progress, which would study the efforts of a prominent French family of art dealers to recover works of art…
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Yes We Kana’i
Writing about the Zealots, the rebels who, according to Jewish historian Josephus Flavius (who lived from about 37 to 100 C.E), fought to the death in Jerusalem against the Romans in the Great Revolt of 67–70 C.E., which ended with the destruction of the Second Temple, Jay P. Mayesh of New York City asks: “*Zelotes…
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