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
Kindling Desire
The only meaning listed in the Oxford English Dictionary for the noun “kindle” is: “The young (of any animal), a young one.” And, despite Amazon’s best efforts, it’s still much easier to find out that information on my phone or my PC than it is on their own Kindle. For those who haven’t yet been…
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Boys, Books and Bildungsroman
I was shocked when I interviewed novelist and Columbia creative writing professor Gary Shteyngart last year and he remarked on how many men write but how few men read novels — statistically speaking. As someone for whom novel-reading is a constitutive pursuit, this gendering of reading sounded absurd. All through high school, college and grad…
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Excerpt: Peter Manseau’s ‘Rag and Bone’
© 2009 by Peter Manseau. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC This is a book about dismembered toes, splinters of shinbone, stolen bits of hair, burned remnants of an anonymous rib cage, and other odds and ends of human remains, but it is not a book about death. Around every one of…
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Words That Shape the Jewish Future
Peter Manseau is drawn to preserving civilizations that, to many, seem long gone. Raised stringently Catholic — his parents met while his father was a priest and his mother was a nun — Manseau’s first job out of college was at the National Jewish Book Center. That gig proved to be a critical introduction to…
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The Lessons of Leo Frank
The sole lynching of a Jew on American soil is a story that many do not know. On April 27, 1913, a young girl, Mary Phagan, was found strangled at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta. Leo Frank, her Jewish supervisor from New York, claimed to be the last to see her alive, and was…
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Shake a Family Tree And a Jew Falls Out
On a Thursday morning, I stop by the restaurant Shoarma Tel Aviv on the way to visit an ancient Jewish cemetery. Friday night, I attend services at an 18th-century synagogue. The restaurant is owned by a Hindustani, and the floor of the synagogue is covered with sand. Where am I? If you guessed Suriname, congratulations…
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Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu
Back at Passover time, I published a column about a facsimile edition of an early 19th-century French Haggadah from Bordeaux, one of whose interesting features was its use of “ngh” to represent the Hebrew letter *ayin. *This was once widespread in the Sephardic communities of Southern Europe, whose Hebrew pronunciation nasalized the pharyngeal glottal stop…
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Partisan or Parasite?
Earlier this month, the 90th birthday of folk legend Pete Seeger drew 15,000 people to New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The sold-out show demonstrated the legacy, and continuing vitality, of the American protest-song tradition, a tradition that was born in the Great Depression and gave rise to some of the fiercest critiques of modern…
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The People Revisit Leo Frank
No double murder has altered the nation’s cultural landscape quite like this one. The killings of Mary Phagan and Leo Frank stirred latent antisemitism, racism, sectionalism and bigotry that festered below the Mason-Dixon Line before exploding nationwide, leaving shockwaves still felt today. On April 27, 1913, 13-year-old Phagan, a gentile white girl, was found strangled…
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La Mort Que Je Conviens
Ghérasim Luca was born in 1913 in Bucharest and, as a Jew and intellectuel, spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German and French, the last being the language of his books. A dissolute late adolescence found Luca traveling often through Paris, where he became interested in the movement called Surrealism. He spent the war hiding in Romania, which…
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Sting Like a Bee: Ali of the Typewriter
Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings By A.J. Liebling, edited by Pete Hamill The Library of America, 1,057 pages, $40.00. One of the last pieces A.J. Liebling ever wrote was about an up-and-coming boxer and versifier named Cassius Clay. Liebling wasn’t entirely sold on the egotistical young fighter, but he was clearly struck by…
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