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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Lazarus Tongues in Israel and Ireland
Kevin Barry, a graduate student in history at the University of Delaware, has sent me a paper he has written that compares the successful revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in 20th-century Palestine/Israel to the failed attempt to revive Gaelic in 20th-century Ireland. Although I once touched on this subject years ago, I did…
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December 19, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward An unusual case is currently being heard in the courtroom of Judge Hendrick in the New York State Supreme Court, where a blind Jewish sweatshop worker is suing his boss for $100,000 in damages for stealing his wife and getting her pregnant. Fabric company owner Simon Schultz stands accused…
The Latest
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Coming Out: It’s the Jewish Thing to Do At Hanukkah
This month marks the occasions of Christmas and Hanukkah — and the two-year anniversary of the decision by the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards that homosexuality does not violate Jewish law. Although these three events may not seem related at first, I think that each one informs the other in meaningful ways….
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Music Shtick and Awe: Daniel Barenboim in New York
You’d think Godzilla, or at least an enemy flotilla, had stormed the gates of the city, the way the media has trumpeted the news; the Financial Times announces, “Daniel Barenboim has invaded New York.” The 66-year-old pianist-conductor, born in Buenos Aires to a family of Russian Ashkenazic Jews who later immigrated to Israel, is definitely…
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Graphic Confessions of Jewish Women
Before you even see her face, Vanessa Davis’ naked breast makes an appearance in the first panel of “Spaniel Rage,” her acclaimed book of diaristic comics. She’s vomiting into a garbage can on page two. By the third page, she’s servicing two clowns in an X-rated thought bubble. Rude? Shocking? Indecent? Try “charming, funny, and…
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The 1-in-5 Majority
Comic strip by Eli Valley. Click on the thumbnail for a larger version. Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His comics appear monthly in The Forward, and his website is www.evcomics.com.
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Yiddish Poetry: Up Close and Personal
With Everything We’ve Got: A Personal Anthology of Yiddish Poetry Edited and Translated By Richard J. Fein Host Publications, 218 pages Hardcover $35.00, Softcover $17.50. While every process of translation involves a dialogue between the work and the person rendering it into a foreign tongue, many translators go to great pains to play down that…
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Man in Search Of Language
Readers expecting a grand symphony on how Hebrew was revived as a living language beginning in the late 19th century will be disappointed by Ilan Stavans’s “Resurrecting Hebrew.” The book deals more with Stavans’s own re-encounter with the language and its meaning for his life than with the creation of modern Hebrew in the late…
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The Great Chrismukkah Mashup
Diwon The Beat Guide to Yiddish Free to download on shemspeed.com/diwon Not for sale. Erran Baron Cohen Songs In The Key Of Hanukkah New Line Records, $12.00 Every artist remembers the first time he or she re–masters another artist’s work. The poet Ezra Pound caught his artistic stride translating traditional Japanese and Chinese poems complete…
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December 12, 2008
100 Years Ago in the Forward Released from Sing-Sing prison just a few months ago, following a long stint for robbery, 21-year-old Solomon “Nig” Stein was arrested as the main suspect in the “Harlem chloroform robberies,” in which victims were put to sleep with chloroform and then robbed. The police, having been on Stein’s trail…
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Stranger in a Strange Land
D. Nahil writes: “Although I was referred to in a blog as a sheygetz in a kind, jovial manner, I’m actually a middle-aged goy who follows the Torah and is thinking of a halakhically Orthodox conversion. What word would be used, more correctly, to describe me (again, in a jovial manner)?” If Mr. Nahil’s letter…
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