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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Sweet Morsels of Faction
True Confections By Katharine Weber Shaye Areheart Books, 288 pages, $22.00. Look online, and you’ll see a Web site for Zip’s Candies, complete with an online order form for their three varieties of confections. Katharine Weber’s new novel, “True Confections,” is about a candy company, Zip’s Candies, and the lives and loves of the Ziplinsky…
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Errors on a Global And Historical Scale
You would think that Stephen P. Cohen, president of the Institute for Middle East Peace & Development and author of “Beyond America’s Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East,” would know better. In an op-ed column on “Eisenhower, Truman on the Mideast” in the January 8 Boston Globe, Mr. Cohen takes Israel…
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January 22, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Numerous spies have infiltrated the ranks of the Bund in the major Jewish areas of the Russian Empire and are causing great difficulties for its operations. As a result, the Bund Central Committee has published a circular describing about a dozen of these spies, a number of whom have…
The Latest
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Taking Avatar Seriously
“If you’re an author or Ph.D. candidate who had the foresight to propose a book on the philosophy of ‘Avatar’ before the film was even released in theaters, the past week (and the blogosphere) has been very, very good to you.” — Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times, December 22, 2009 Well, good for me,…
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Camondo Splendor
The fate of the Camondo family illustrates just how perilous it can be to be generous to the people of France. An exemplary exhibit, The Splendour of the House of Camondo: From Constantinople to Paris, 1806–1845, which opened November 6, 2009, at Paris’s Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (Museum of Jewish Art and History)…
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Saviors at Nazi Ground Zero
Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” introduced the world to the improbable enigma and moral dilemma of a German Nazi Party member who rescued Jews. The combined commercial forces of Spielberg and the Hollywood image-making machine turned Oskar Schindler into a larger-than-life hero. The New York Jewish Film Festival, presented by the Jewish Museum and the Film…
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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…
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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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