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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A Modern Esther Returns
After a year spent dark while renovating what is now the David H. Koch Theater, the New York City Opera has chosen to revive one of the most powerful American Jewish operas for its first full production of the season. On November 7, Hugo Weisgall’s “Esther,” which premiered in 1993 to nearly universal acclaim, will…
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Gabriel and Fanny — A Jewish-Israeli Tale of Love and Hate
Grandfather left Grandmother. In those days it was considered a scandal, a secret whispered behind closed doors, unsuited, God forbid, for children’s ears. Like death, divorce was never mentioned. In those days people didn’t get divorced and didn’t die. Grandfather left Grandmother, but he also left my father, a six-month old baby at the time,…
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The Holocaust Novel From Israel That America Can’t Handle
And the Rat Laughed By Nava Semel, Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger Hybrid Publishers, 232 pages, $25.00 ‘And the Rat Laughed” is an exquisitely wrought meditation on the present and future of Holocaust memory in Israel after the survivors are gone. Integrating story, legend, poetry, dream, science fiction and diary, Semel’s novel begins…
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High School Reunion
In the summer of 1973, when they last saw each other, Jane and Susie were a couple of frizzy-haired Jewish girls on the letter “E” page of the Mount Vernon High School yearbook. Now, older than their mothers were then, and with seven children and stepchildren between them, Jane Eisner is the editor of the…
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October 30, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward Still in critical condition not long after being attacked by hired goons while he was on the picket line in front of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, Joe Zigfeld lies in a hospital bed. His attackers, however, are roaming freely. The violence surrounding the pickets has abated over the past…
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Who’s Afraid of Jerusalem?
Who’s afraid of Jerusalem? Who loathes and despises her? Who execrates her, heart and tongue? Who says, What am I doing in this city of black hats And maniacs This city of blood and enmity Where Hillel the Elder pursues peace Amid the broken cups and carnage? Who hates Jerusalem For the love wherewith he…
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A Plot Against America: A Jewish Writer’s Forgotten ‘Future History’ Of a Nazi Takeover
Arch Oboler’s “This Precious Freedom” (1942) is the first film ever made about a Nazi takeover of the United States. It was suppressed by its producer, an automaking company better known today for financial than moral bankruptcy: General Motors Corp. Broadly, Oboler was to radio what Rod Serling (“The Twilight Zone”) became to television. But…
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Dying Real
In the Oscar-winning movie “Departures,” Yojiro Takita shows traditional Japanese customs for preparing bodies for casketing prior to cremation. The art is beautiful, precise and utterly respectful of the deceased. From the very first scene, however, the movie-going audience’s expectations of the “traditional” are ruffled. First, the film shows a contemporary Japanese society in which…
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The Cons of Pro and Caring More
I suppose it is late in the day to plunge into the argument over J Street, the “pro-Israel” Political Action Committee — as it likes to call itself — whose repeated criticism of Israeli government policies and actions has many supporters of Israel up in arms. Still, with the organization’s first annual conference in Washington…
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Books An Actor Exits
The Humbling By Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 160 pages, $22. Imminence of the end concentrates the craft. German critics employ the term Altersstill — late style — to designate the tendency of such aging masters as Poussin, Beethoven and Beckett to focus their energies on essentials. Once the enfant terrible of American Jewish literature,…
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Books On Becoming a ‘Beaner’: A Mexican American Story
‘Mexicans are the scum of the earth,” a student of mine said after being asked to describe the status of the immigrants at her South Carolina high school. She wasn’t menacing. We’ve known each other for years; she knows I’m both Mexican and an immigrant. My student was simply expressing the general view of the…
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