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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Raiding the Archive: Bringing Klezmer to the Masses Once Again
It’s a truism of traditional music that in order to go forward, you have to go back. To innovate on old material, you have to know the old material in the first place. But in the case of Yiddish music, there’s often not much to go back to. During the heyday of Yiddish culture in…
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Shedding a Little Light on Sea Monsters and Planets
It was one of the less publicized contests of 2009, and the winners won’t be given any prizes, but there are nonetheless two of them. They are oron and rahav, and they are now the official Hebrew names of the planets Uranus and Neptune, which until now had to be known to Hebrew speakers as,…
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January 15, 2010
100 Years Ago In the Forward It was “he-said, she-said” as the case of Mr. and Mrs. Levine was heard before Judge Whitney in the New York Supreme Court. “You’re a dog and a monster,” was among the printable terms of approbation that Mr. Levine, a lawyer who defended himself, frequently heard from his wife…
The Latest
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Guileless in Gaza
It is difficult not to be impressed by Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza.” A unique journalistic product, Sacco’s latest book offers an in-depth look at disputed events that took place after the Israelis occupied Gaza at the beginning of the aborted British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. Perhaps these are neglected “footnotes” in the history…
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Engraved on the Unconscious: French Historian Élisabeth Roudinesco on Antisemitism
On a subject where hysteria often seems to reign, a brilliant, well thought-out and balanced new book like “Return to the Jewish Question” (Retour sur la question juive) by the French historian and psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco is a treasure which urgently deserves translation into English. Now 65, Roudinesco, niece of the noted French Jewish feminist…
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Defying Threats and Madoff, the AICF Marches On
Visitors to the America-Israel Cultural Foundation website see bad news and good in anticipation of this year’s gala fundraiser January 10th at Carnegie Hall. The bad news, announced in a banner: “Unfortunately, the bulk of AICF’s endowments were invested with Bernard L. Madoff Securities.” The good news, AICF is one of the few charities to…
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Brutal on the Beach
Israeli choreographer Nir de Volff is one of the most promising newcomers on Berlin’s vibrant dance scene. Early in December 2009, expectations ran high for the premiere of “Maktot,” his dissection of the social complexities of beach culture. His previous creation, a site-specific dance in Berlin’s iconic Neue Synagoge called “Action!” had a successful run…
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Revelling in the End of Utopia
Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era By Jean-François Revel, Translated by Diarmid V.C. Cammell Encounter Books, 300 pages, $23.95. Jean-François Revel, who died three years ago this past spring, was America’s most intellectual supporter in France. He was a philosopher and writer, a Resistance fighter during the war (born…
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God Lives, but Not in Cambridge
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Random House 416 pages, $27.95. Here is an ambitious novel about big ideas — love, sex, religion — that nevertheless faces these issues with irony and humor. A novel sprinkled with Yiddish and Hebrew, and populated mostly by secular Jews…
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Back to Kovno
This year, the first comprehensive collection of South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer’s nonfiction works will be published. Consistent with a more pervasive silence of her generation, it is unlikely to include more than scant reference to her father’s Lithuanian background. A younger generation of Jewish South African artists of Lithuanian descent, including textile designer…
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Kalanter Banter
An eponym is a word formed from someone’s name. Most languages have them, and English alone has hundreds — some that are clearly so, and others disguised as ordinary-looking words. You don’t have to be an etymologist or a newspaper reader to guess that “Ponzi scheme” probably derives from a man named Ponzi. On the…
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