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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Drawing the Devil Away From Children
As if to raise a curtain on the coming celebration of Maurice Sendak, the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum has unveiled a probing, multidimensional exhibit showing the back story of the children’s author and illustrator, whose “Where the Wild Things Are” is about to open as a major motion picture. Heralded by high-decibel discussion, including…
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Revenge, a Dish Best Served Convincing
Over the summer, much was made in the media of the success of Quentin Tarantino’s Jewish revenge picture, “Inglorious Basterds.” A mix of structural virtuosity and moral and emotional nincompoopery, the film expressed Tarantino’s lip-smacking love of torture, and titillated audiences were delighted by its sadism. Daniel Goldfarb’s similarly themed play, “The Retributionists,” has had…
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Supreme Jewish Achievement
Louis D. Brandeis: A Life By Melvin I. Urofsky Pantheon Books, 976 pages, $40.00. Louis Brandeis was the Jewish Barack Obama. Or, if not, perhaps the legal Henry Kissinger. Perhaps smarter (graduating from Harvard Law School with the highest GPA on record) but less political, he was the golden boy of the judiciary and the…
The Latest
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A Free Account of Liberal Jewish History
Why Are Jews Liberals? By Norman Podhoretz Doubleday, 352 pages, $27.00. Norman Podhoretz, who was the editor of Commentary magazine for four decades, has caused a stir regularly with his essays and books. “Why Are Jews Liberals?” is no exception. Part historical lesson, part autobiography (the latter a genre that Podhoretz first explored in his…
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Yours Is the Earth and Everything In It
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son By Michael Chabon HarperCollins, 320 pages, $25.99. The moment occurs in the life of nearly every important novelist, sooner or later. And in these novelists’ defense, often as not, they cry, “My editor made me do it!” “It” in this case is…
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The Great War: A Letter From the Front Deciphered
Forward reader Leonard Nelson has presented me with a challenge. “Attached to my e-mail,” he writes, “is a photograph and note from my father sent to his family while serving in the Russian army in World War I. The note is written in a cursive Yiddish that I cannot read. I would appreciate any assistance…
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October 2, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward A Bintel Brief has a letter written by an embittered man who ran into trouble getting together a minyan for his son’s bris. It was the eve of Yom Kippur and, as he stood in front of his building, trying to find a 10th man for the minyan, a…
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Film & TV Yom Kippur on the Big Screen
Would you shut up? I’m trying to atone!” That line comes in the opening scene of “Kissing Jessica Stein” delivered by the titular character, as she sits in the pews on Yom Kippur and tries to fend off her relatives’ too-eager advice about snagging a man before next year’s Book of Life is shut. Jessica,…
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Patrick Swayze: This Jewish Girl Will Miss You
For Jewish women of a certain age, Patrick Swayze will always occupy a special corner of the heart. Tough and tender, he embodied for some of us — ok for me, at least — a certain fantasy. Let’s call it the Jewish girl’s yearning for the blue-eyed Christian boy — akin to the Jewish boy’s…
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Pornographic Stimulus Plan
The bearded receptionist wears a yarmulke. In any other office, this wouldn’t seem remarkable. But this is the midtown Manhattan headquarters of Lucas Entertainment, one of the largest gay adult film companies in the world. The yarmulke — worn in memory of a recently departed grandmother, it turns out — seems weirdly apt once you…
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Fusion Shmusion
With a multitude of workshops for musicians and Yiddish culture buffs, the annual KlezKanada Festival takes place at the end of August in the mountains north of Montreal. This year, I was able to sit in on Josh Dolgin’s “Fusion Shmusion” class, whose catalog description started with the question, “Does most Jewishy fusion music suck?”…
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