Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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The Aesthetics of Violence Examined
Following the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was caught musing that the event was “the greatest work of art that is possible,” a statement that provoked widespread outrage and led to the cancellation of several concerts of his work. Though New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini, among others,…
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Eliran Scores a Stunner
Eliran Atar, his immense talent rescued from a life of petty crime, scores an amazing goal in the Israeli soccer league. Bnei Yehuda (in orange) are the gutsy underdogs from the wrong side of the tracks playing against Maccabi Netanya, the third-best team in the country — owned by the millionaire Daniel Jammer and coached…
The Latest
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Martin Munkacsi: The Prodigal Archives
To see him roaming the halls of Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1960s, poor and desperate for commissions, it must have been hard to believe that only a few decades earlier, Martin Munkacsi was one of the world’s highest-paid photographers. During a 2007 retrospective of his work, shown in New York at the International Center…
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You Shoot, He Scores: The Kibbutz King of Komposers
“My grandparents drained swamps and established Kibbutz Merchavia in northern Israel. My father, an actor/director, and my mother, a teacher/poet, lived on it and raised three sons there… They divorced when I was 20. I moved to Tel Aviv to study at the Music Academy and was advised by my guru, ‘There’s nothing more for…
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Animated Catharsis
Despite eight nominations spanning 44 years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has never bestowed its award for best foreign language film on an Israeli picture. Many expect that this will change this year at the 81st Annual Academy Awards, to be aired February 22, thanks to the nomination of “Waltz With Bashir.”…
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Spit Your Way To Safety: Toi, toi, toi!
On my way to tomatoes this morning, I was sidetracked by expectorations. If that seems like an odd thing to happen, let me explain. It all began with a letter from Forward reader Herbert Hoffman, who wanted to know the derivation of the Yiddish word for “tomato,” pomedor. *Although I knew the answer, I wasn’t…
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Books Chagall’s Political Art
Suspended in white space, a goat romps and a rooster struts across a modest book cover. Beneath them, running right to left, is the Yiddish word “mayselekh” — less a title than a simple description of what’s inside: two little stories for children. The book, which is more like a pamphlet, is small enough to…
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Books Ruth Wisse: Generous Mentor, Worthy Adversary
Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse Edited by Justin Daniel Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint and Rachel Rubinstein *Harvard University Press, 750 pages, $75. * In September 1976, Commentary printed the letters of three novelists who had taken umbrage at appraisals of their work, in…
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Books Women’s Work
Each month, a handful of New York feminists, who are also students of Yiddish, get together in each other’s homes to read the work of Yiddish women writers. Several writers, a couple of filmmakers and librarians, a culinary scholar and a singer/songwriter form the core of the group. Our population, however, expands and contracts, following…
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Books The Poetry of Language
There are many bilingual Jewish books in which the two languages are dependent on each other. The Gemara is a mostly Aramaic reworking of the Hebrew-language Mishnah. The stories of Reb Nachman of Breslov were told in Yiddish, but their first written versions were in Hebrew. The majority of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work is now…
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Books Kids Lit: More Yiddish Books Begin To Sprout
Let’s say you’re raising your children in Yiddish and you want to buy them some books. What do you do? If you walk into the children’s section of any bookstore, you’ll be deluged with a huge number of engaging, beautifully illustrated books, from board books to chapter books to beautifully rendered pop-ups. But none of…
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