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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September 11, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward Ida Feitelson’s father is upset, and with good reason. The attractive 17-year-old brunette, in the country for only three years, has disappeared without a trace. She had been working in a shop and had saved $100, which she dutifully deposited in the bank. But then she wanted dancing lessons,…
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Whoa, Nelly!
French-Jewish filmmaker and writer Nelly Kaplan, born in Buenos Aires in 1936 (some sources say 1931) to Russian-Jewish parents, has long been the incarnation of a particularly romantic ideal. She is featured as part of the first major exhibition of women artists and surrealism to be held in Europe, Angels of Anarchy, opening on September…
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Striking the Right Notes
Before we know it, Rosh Hashanah, and with it, an incentive to visit our local synagogue for perhaps the first time in many months, will be upon us. We are drawn back to the synagogue for a number of reasons, many of them having more to do with filial piety — with devotion to family…
The Latest
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Eprhyme — Engaged and Diverse Hip Hop Jew
Here’s what it’s not about: cute Yiddish puns, bar mitzvah kitsch, Manischewitz cocktails, or the novelty of a Jewish “insert unexpected form” (rap, reggae, whatever) star. Here’s what it does seem to be about: post-sacred-cow radical pluralism, pantheism, religious consciousness fused with social action, and an uncompromising and unimpressed blend of urban forms and neo-Hasidic…
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The Guilted Age
Essays By Wallace Shawn Haymarket Books, 161 pages, $18.95. Reading Wallace Shawn’s new collection of essays, it’s hard not to hear his distinctive nasal chirp declaiming aloud in the mind’s ear. This is particularly true because, in an unusual move for the actor and playwright, the essays are written in Shawn’s own voice. “Perhaps it’s…
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Ark Art: Actually Christian Imagery?
As synagogues swap their regular ark curtains for the white High Holy Day versions, many will unwittingly showcase a pair of symbols not only of Christian origin, but whose very content symbolizes God’s rejection of the Jews. The culprits — two twisted or vine-encircled pillars — appear in places as august and storied as Safed’s…
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The Queer Queen of Comedy
‘Carol Leifer Gets Weirder: Now Jewish, Lesbian, and Vegan,” an online gossip headline blared after the comedian filmed a Web ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. While most of that line rings true — Leifer is Semitic, same-sex loving and vegan — “weird” is the last word that comes to mind for…
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Fallen From Grace to Gratuitous Hate
From Baltimore comes this query from Stanley Cohen: “In discussions in Israel of that country’s internal strife, one Hebrew phrase I’ve found constantly repeated is sin’at ḥinam, commonly translated as ‘baseless hatred.’ In this usage, what is the syntax and morphology of the word ḥinam? At first glance it looks like it might come from…
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Remembering (Not) Remembering
We Remember With Reverence And Love: American Jews And The Myth Of Silence After The Holocaust, 1945-1962 By Hasia Diner New York University Press, 528 pages, $29.95. Hasia Diner is a historian who believes that things actually happened in history. She is also comprehensive, indeed dogged in her research, which her oeuvre amply demonstrates. Diner,…
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American Eccentrics
Homer and Langley Collyer became reluctant celebrities in the late 1930s when their decaying Harlem mansion began to attract the attention of neighbors and the press. Scions of an old New York family, the Collyer brothers had lived alone in the four-story brownstone since their mother’s death in the late ‘20s, leaving their home less…
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When American Judaism Was Yiddish
Yiddish Drashos and Writings By Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, edited by David E. Fishman Ktav Publishing House, 355 pages, $29.50. There was a time when American Jews of very different ideological perspectives would talk, and listen, to each other. One Sunday in 1949, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the leading Orthodox Talmudic scholar in America, addressed…
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