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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Before Zero Hour: A Q&A with Jim Brochu
Award-winning drama “Zero Hour” deals with the life of actor and comedian Samuel “Zero” Mostel. Most famous for his stage version of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Mostel was a complicated character who was at work in showbusiness at the darkest hour of the blacklist. Gwen Orel spoke to Jim Brochu who wrote the…
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Bildung Mendelssohn
How ugly were these porcelain monkeys? Ugly enough that when the West Berlin Senate tried to put one of them in a 1978 museum exhibition about Prussia, a different one was substituted because the original was judged too embarrassing. Composer Felix Mendelssohn had kept the original in his study, to show visitors. To understand why…
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Our Father, In Law
William Kunstler, the late civil rights lawyer, used to brag to his daughters, Emily and Sarah, that he was the only Jew in a youth street gang of Latinos and blacks. Fueled by the values of his faith, Kunstler later commanded turf far beyond his neighborhood. “The work that Bill did with the outcasts, the…
The Latest
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The Fascination of Israel
Israel vs. Utopia By Joel Schalit Akashic Books, 250 pages, $15.95. The Myths of Liberal Zionism By Yitzhak Laor Verso, 128 pages, $22.95. A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement By James Horrox AK Press, 167 pages, $17.95. A common theme in pro-Israel discourse is that critics of Israel are “obsessed” with the Jewish…
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A Good Guy To Know
What would you say about a lifeguard who took nearly two-and-a-half years to answer a cry for help? Well, that’s me. Rummaging through a drawer of my desk the other day, I found this letter from Carolyn Shapiro of Washington, D.C., dated July 2, 2007: “Worthy Philologos, “Help! Help! I am a member of a…
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The Meditation Of Travel
To warm ourselves before a stove in a foreign province, to rise early, the wayfarer’s prayer on our tongues, to watch fish blaze through shallow streams and think of home, to shift our load from one shoulder to the next and be reminded of the faces of lovers that failed us ages ago. All these…
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December 25, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward Samuel Rogoff, a resident of Manhattan’s Harlem section, was brought into Special Sessions Court, accused by the police of being New York City’s “king of the pimps.” Police told the judge that Rogoff operates dozens of underground brothels throughout the city; his method is to rent apartments and set…
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A WASPy Jew Finds Her Roots
My 93-year-old father recently died at home in his sleep. He was Jewish, but he was buried by a reverend in a nondenominational cemetery in Connecticut. A few years earlier, he had told me he had mixed feelings about being buried by a rabbi who’d speak in “that language you don’t understand.” “You mean Hebrew,…
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Zeroing In
What do you know about Zero Mostel? If all you know is that he was the original Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Jim Brochu’s one-man show, “Zero Hour,” introduces you to the real force that provides this excuse for a tour-de-force role. Brochu (pronounced Bro-shu) wrote the piece, and over the years he has…
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Nowhere Near the Finish Line
In a September 9 article in The New York Times, David Mamet offered a précis of his new play, “Race,” which opened on December 6 at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theater: “As a Jew, I will relate that there is nothing a non-Jew can say to a Jew on the subject of Jewishness that is…
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Therapist by Day, Boxer by Night
A bloody mouthguard floats in a bucket that I am holding under a young Hispanic man’s face. It is a frantic moment between rounds, and I am working the corner, reaching through the ropes of the boxing ring and mopping his dark kinky hair with a torn white towel. Inside the ring, kneeling at Manuel’s…
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