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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September 18, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward Manuel Rosa, an “Indian chief” who performs the “war dance” onstage at Inman’s Casino in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, attacked Sam Friedman, a waiter, during a recent performance. Rosa, who was performing in full Indian regalia and waving a tomahawk, was onstage as Friedman approached a group of women sitting…
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Books Double Trouble: Two Newish Novels Sport Eerily Similar Covers
Here’s a situation that harkens back to flipping through children’s magazines in my pediatrician’s office waiting room: What’s the difference between these two pictures? Lucinda Rosenfeld’s “I’m So Happy For You” (Back Bay Books, July 2009) and Laurie Graff’s “The Shiksa Syndrome” (Broadway Books, October, 2008) may have hit shelves more than a year apart,…
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Film & TV Jews are Clever, Make Different Movies
Brazil is not only home to the Jules Rimet trophy, Copacabana beach, Carnaval and the frighteningly militarized favelas portrayed in “City of God,” it’s also the location of an old and respected Yiddish community. Now Jose de Abreu is making a Yiddish-speaking film — “Where Pigs Eat Oranges” — about Jewish immigration from Czarist Russia…
The Latest
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Film & TV An ‘Unmistaken Child’ Crosses the USA
Released in June from Oscilloscope Distribution, the documentary “Unmistaken Child” by Jerusalem-born Nati Baratz, a graduate of Tel-Aviv University’s Film School, continues its triumphal march across America, with scheduled screenings in Honolulu (Sept. 9); Cleveland (Sept. 11); Great Barrington, MA (Sept. 11); Key West (Sept. 11); and San Francisco (Sept. 13), and further showings into…
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September 11, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward Ida Feitelson’s father is upset, and with good reason. The attractive 17-year-old brunette, in the country for only three years, has disappeared without a trace. She had been working in a shop and had saved $100, which she dutifully deposited in the bank. But then she wanted dancing lessons,…
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Whoa, Nelly!
French-Jewish filmmaker and writer Nelly Kaplan, born in Buenos Aires in 1936 (some sources say 1931) to Russian-Jewish parents, has long been the incarnation of a particularly romantic ideal. She is featured as part of the first major exhibition of women artists and surrealism to be held in Europe, Angels of Anarchy, opening on September…
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Striking the Right Notes
Before we know it, Rosh Hashanah, and with it, an incentive to visit our local synagogue for perhaps the first time in many months, will be upon us. We are drawn back to the synagogue for a number of reasons, many of them having more to do with filial piety — with devotion to family…
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Eprhyme — Engaged and Diverse Hip Hop Jew
Here’s what it’s not about: cute Yiddish puns, bar mitzvah kitsch, Manischewitz cocktails, or the novelty of a Jewish “insert unexpected form” (rap, reggae, whatever) star. Here’s what it does seem to be about: post-sacred-cow radical pluralism, pantheism, religious consciousness fused with social action, and an uncompromising and unimpressed blend of urban forms and neo-Hasidic…
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The Guilted Age
Essays By Wallace Shawn Haymarket Books, 161 pages, $18.95. Reading Wallace Shawn’s new collection of essays, it’s hard not to hear his distinctive nasal chirp declaiming aloud in the mind’s ear. This is particularly true because, in an unusual move for the actor and playwright, the essays are written in Shawn’s own voice. “Perhaps it’s…
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Ark Art: Actually Christian Imagery?
As synagogues swap their regular ark curtains for the white High Holy Day versions, many will unwittingly showcase a pair of symbols not only of Christian origin, but whose very content symbolizes God’s rejection of the Jews. The culprits — two twisted or vine-encircled pillars — appear in places as august and storied as Safed’s…
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The Queer Queen of Comedy
‘Carol Leifer Gets Weirder: Now Jewish, Lesbian, and Vegan,” an online gossip headline blared after the comedian filmed a Web ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. While most of that line rings true — Leifer is Semitic, same-sex loving and vegan — “weird” is the last word that comes to mind for…
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