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 Midas Touch of Hungarian-Jewish architect Ernö Goldfinger
Long derided as a creator of “Brutalist” architecture, the Budapest-born Ernö Goldfinger in 1902 has more recently won respect and even admiration, as two London local councils opted in November 2009 to preserve the low-lying buildings which he designed near his landmark high-rise social housing Trellick Tower itself now a “listed building” of special significance….
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Just Passing Through
Life as a Visitor By Angella M. Nazarian Assouline Publishing, 168 pages, $45.00. Driven by American interest in the Middle East, the past 10 years have produced a slew of memoirs and novels by Iranian émigrés, especially women. Farideh Goldin, in her essay “Iranian Women and Contemporary Memoirs,” attributes this boom to four main factors:…
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132 Years of American Jewish Fiction
It’s not news that Jews tell the same stories over and over again. Anyone who has attended a Simchat Torah celebration knows that when the congregation finally reaches the last sentence of the Torah, they take a deep breath, twirl around a few times, drink a little schnapps, and then, with no further ado, start…
The Latest
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Ilyas Malayev, Uzbeki Rock Star
In 1992, Bukharian Jewish poet, maqam player and Uzbek rock star Ilyas Malayev immigrated to Queens from Tashkent in Central Asia. When Theodore Levin profiled him for his book, “The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York)” (Indiana University Press, 1997), the forgotten celebrity was sharing a three-room…
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January 1, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Hyman Epstein, the former Brooklyn banker who two years ago absconded with more than $60,000 in depositors? money, has finally been arrested. Admitting his guilt, he said that his conscience would not let him rest and that he is ready to accept whatever the justice system doles out to…
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Greek Jews Remembered: Resilient, Passionate, Variegated
The history of Greek Jews is dizzyingly complex. Comprising both the Greek-speaking Romaniotes and the exiled Sephardim of Thessaloniki, some of whom spoke Ladino, the differing cultures are expertly distinguished in K. E. Fleming’s “Greece: A Jewish History” (Princeton University Press) of which a paperback edition is due this spring, and Steven Bowman’s new “The…
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Song, Dance and Oud
In comparison with some forms of Sephardic culture, Ashkenazic Judaism can come out looking as bland as a gefilte fish that’s lost its horseradish. Not to belittle klezmer, Yiddish or, has v’halila, a good matzo ball, but the inflections of Spanish and Ottoman culture in Sephardic arts render the ordinary exotic for the majority of…
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A Painter of Rabbinic Primal Screams: Boston Expressionist Hyman Bloom
Art lovers have until January 24 to catch a compelling exhibit at the Yeshiva University Museum, “Hyman Bloom: A Spiritual Embrace.” Originating at Massachusetts’s Danforth Museum of Art the show focuses on Bloom, one of the key Boston Expressionists examined in “Boston Modern: Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism” by Judith Bookbinder (University of New Hampshire…
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To (Richard) Hell and Back
You might think that the Venn diagram circles of arty intellectuals and punk rockers would never intersect. Yet, back in the 1970’s many of the original punk musicians considered themselves primarily poets or writers, with singing just a way to liberate their thoughts from their heads or writing paper. These writers included Patti Smith, Jim…
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Dizengoff and the City
An urbanist discourse is alive and well in Israel, as evidenced by the cultural critic Tamar Berger, who studies Israeli — especially Tel Aviv — space in her acclaimed book “Dionysus at Dizengoff Center” (1998), newly translated into French as “Place Dizengoff” by Actes Sud Publishers by the remarkable Turkish-born writer Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech and long…
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Give It a Rest, Adam Sandler: The New Jewish Holiday Tunes
Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song” turned 15 this year and it’s apparently settled into our collective consciousness as the new holiday standard, a sort of Jewish equivalent to “Silent Night,” or perhaps “White Christmas” (though that’s sort of a Jewish song itself). Yup, it’s all over the media this month. The Forward’s Jenna Joselit Weissman calls…
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