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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Living With Imminent Ghosts
Invisible Sisters By Jessica Handler PublicAffairs, 272 pages, $24.95. Susie Handler died of acute lymphocytic leukemia in 1969, when she was 8 years old. Her sisters, Sarah and Jessica (ages 4 and 10, respectively, at the time), grew up in the aftermath, with the next inevitable trauma looming: Sarah had Kostmann’s syndrome, a bone marrow…
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Wunderkind Lost: Rosenfeld’s Passage From Home
Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing By Steven J. Zipperstein Yale University Press, 288 pages, $27.50. Born in Chicago in 1918, Isaac Rosenfeld was a wunderkind. he wasn’t even 20 when he collaborated with his buddy Saul Bellow on “*Der Shir Hashirim fun *Mendel Pumshtock,” a brilliant parody of T.S. Eliot’s “The…
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Hot, Rare and Missed
James A. Goldman of New York writes to ask about Birkat Hachamah, the Blessing of the Sun — that once-in-28-years event in Jewish liturgy that, despite my best intentions, I slept through for the third time in my life when it was observed at sunrise Wednesday, April 8. As the sun peered over the horizon…
The Latest
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April 24, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward If ever there was a shining light in the depressing darkness of Ellis Island, it was Alexander Harkavy, a brilliant, highly educated man whose love for humanity could be seen in a place where people have no value. Harkavy, who until recently worked for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,…
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Israeli Choreographer Wins Lifetime Award
Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of the Israeli-based Batsheva Dance Company will receive the 2009 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth is reporting. Naharin, who studied and worked with dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, has directed the innovative modern dance troupe since 1990. In addition to his choreography, Naharin…
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‘American Idol’ Frontrunner Pays Tribute to Rabin
Years before Adam Lambert, this season’s “American Idol” frontrunner, made Simon Cowell go weak at the knees, he sang Shir Lashalom alongside Noa Dori and Maya Haddi at a 2005 Yitzhak Rabin tribute concert: A year earlier, Lambert won rave reviews for his performance as Joshua in a musical version of “The Ten Commandments,” staged…
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Turning His Lens on the ADL
Controversy isn’t new terrain for Yoav Shamir. And controversy is the likely response to “Defamation,” his new documentary focused on anti-Zionism, antisemitism and the Arab-Israeli conflict, among other lightning rods. The Anti-Defamation League and its director, Abraham Foxman, figure prominently in the film, as do “Holocaust Industry” author Norman Finkelstein and a group of Israeli…
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Jew vs. Jew in Levittown
Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb By David Kushner Walker & Company, 256 pages, $25. Virtually since its founding on New York’s Long Island in 1948, “Levittown” has been a byword for conformity: houses, people, aspirations; a kind of origin narrative of suburban homogeneity. But David…
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Former Mayor Ed Koch on His Bout With Depression
In the Forward’s Bintel Brief advice column this week, Ed Koch — New York City’s 105th mayor — speaks candidly about his bout with depression. Responding to a question from an ailing elderly woman who feels her life is no longer worth living, Koch shares how, in 1989, when he was the mayor of New…
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What’s ‘Good For the Jews’
What’s good for the Jews? Well if you ask three Jews you’re likely to get five answers. Luckily the some of them are more entertaining to listen to than that of your grandma, rabbi or Seder companion. Rob Tannenbaum, a member of the musical comedy duo Good for the Jews — David Fagin is the…
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Nuptial Disagreements
Getting hitched in Israel is hardly a simple proposition, as a new documentary on the subject shows. In the Jewish state, marriage is only possible through Israel’s chief rabbinate — the pre-eminent religious governing body, which predates the founding of the state itself; non-Jewish Israelis must be married by their own religious authorities. In addition,…
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Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
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Music ‘No matter what, I will always be a Jew.’ Billy Joel opens up about his family’s Holocaust history
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Culture She was my Hebrew school bully — and I finally learned what happened to her
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Opinion American Jews were played — now what?
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