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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Sparks Fly in the Brandwein: Classic Klezmer for Six Strings
The Piedmont region of the Eastern United States is best known for blues, not klezmer. But acoustic guitarist Tim Sparks, a native of Winston-Salem, N.C., is throwing the weight of his background behind Jewish folk music, reinventing both the music and the guitar in the process. “Little Princess,” Sparks’s fourth album exploring Jewish music, is…
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Not Science Fiction
Imagine worshipping a writer in early life, then becoming an essential force in preserving his work. This is Jonathan Lethem’s labor of love, to keep us reading Philip K. Dick. A music aficionado and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Lethem now has his own vast canon — seven novels, numerous stories, a novella, a comic book…
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Dreams of the Displaced
In the aftermath of World War II, roughly 250,000 Jews — most of them Holocaust survivors — lived in displaced persons camps in Europe. Many of these people were attracted to Zionism, and about two-thirds of them eventually would move to British Mandate Palestine or to Israel. In his new book, “Finding Home and Homeland:…
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At Home To War and Peace
The central moment in Doron Ben-Atar’s new play “Peace Warriors” about the personalities, politics and relationships of the American academic left can slip by if you don’t pay attention. It takes place at the home of Darryl (the wife) and Scooter (the husband) Lewis. The couple, both Jews, live in New Haven, where she teaches…
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No Danish Patsies
The movie screen shows two freshly dug graves sitting side by side in a meadow somewhere in the Danish hills. As the camera pans toward the sky, the clouds begin to break, finally shining light on a movie otherwise heavy with drab shades of brown, gray, green and blue. It is a poetic, albeit depressing,…
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A ‘New Jew’ Goes to Auschwitz
I am not a Holocaust Jew. Though Auschwitz loomed large in my Jewish education, and though as a child I was duly traumatized and outraged by what my teachers described as the inexplicable and unprecedented evil perpetrated against us, it plays only a small role in my current Jewish identity and practice. This is by…
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August 14, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward The current strike of the 200 ladies waistmakers at the Rosen Brothers factory on East 10th Street in New York City has turned into an all-out war, with professional brawlers and rented bums attacking the striking workers on a daily basis. In the hallway where the strikers congregate, one…
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Ron Arad’s Inventive Life Now on Display
Looking through a scrap yard in 1981, Israeli designer Ron Arad found two discarded red-leather seats from a British car, the Rover V8 2L. Back in his studio, he took them apart and anchored each one in tubular steel frames using cast iron “Kee Klamps,” a scaffolding system dating to the 1930s used for cow-milking…
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Yoo-hoo and Hubbub
Much has been made of late of the yoo-hooing Molly Goldberg, the eponymous subject of Aviva Kempner’s warmhearted documentary about Gertrude Berg, the hugely successful actress and producer of the interwar years who created the long-running fictional character on radio and television. Framed by an open window and a cheery flower pot, Molly announces her…
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Written in Stone
American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone By D.D. Guttenplan Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 592 pages, $35.00. When only 33, D.D. Guttenplan took on a courageous endeavor that would overwhelm him for the next two decades: He set out to write a substantive biography about the legendary maverick journalist I.F. Stone, a man…
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Photographs That Are Deserved
French-Jewish photographer Willy Ronis, born in 1910, has never been more popular. Honored at a special exhibit at this summer’s Rencontres d’Arles photography festival on view in Southern France until September 14 (alongside such counterculture stars as America’s Nan Goldin), Ronis has recent books out from a flurry of international publishers, including Taschen, Phaidon, Gallimard…
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