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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Breakthrough After Breakthrough: Israeli Film History in Motion
One of the few surprises of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony was the snub of Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir,” the animated film about the First Lebanon War that seemed poised to win Israel its first ever statuette for best foreign film. Instead, the Oscar went unexpectedly (some might say inexplicably) to the Japanese film…
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The (Messy) Writing on the Wall
Two current shows at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art are a study in contrasts. The retrospective Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel shares the sixth floor, but little else, with Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective. Whereas the late German artist’s work (and life) was an ode to excess — he died in…
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Skokie Builds To Remember
Ever since the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1993, America has witnessed a Holocaust museum construction boom. The Museum of Tolerance (Los Angeles, 1993), the Holocaust Museum Houston (1996), the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (New York City, 1997) and the Holocaust…
The Latest
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Kosher Sumo
‘A Matter of Size” (“Sipur Gadol”) happens to be one of the Israeli entries in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival — but it addresses personal conflict rather than the more stereotypical geopolitical conflict. Directed by Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor, the movie tells the story of an overweight Israeli chef who mutinies from the rigors…
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Living With Imminent Ghosts
Invisible Sisters By Jessica Handler PublicAffairs, 272 pages, $24.95. Susie Handler died of acute lymphocytic leukemia in 1969, when she was 8 years old. Her sisters, Sarah and Jessica (ages 4 and 10, respectively, at the time), grew up in the aftermath, with the next inevitable trauma looming: Sarah had Kostmann’s syndrome, a bone marrow…
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Wunderkind Lost: Rosenfeld’s Passage From Home
Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing By Steven J. Zipperstein Yale University Press, 288 pages, $27.50. Born in Chicago in 1918, Isaac Rosenfeld was a wunderkind. he wasn’t even 20 when he collaborated with his buddy Saul Bellow on “*Der Shir Hashirim fun *Mendel Pumshtock,” a brilliant parody of T.S. Eliot’s “The…
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Hot, Rare and Missed
James A. Goldman of New York writes to ask about Birkat Hachamah, the Blessing of the Sun — that once-in-28-years event in Jewish liturgy that, despite my best intentions, I slept through for the third time in my life when it was observed at sunrise Wednesday, April 8. As the sun peered over the horizon…
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April 24, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward If ever there was a shining light in the depressing darkness of Ellis Island, it was Alexander Harkavy, a brilliant, highly educated man whose love for humanity could be seen in a place where people have no value. Harkavy, who until recently worked for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,…
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Israeli Choreographer Wins Lifetime Award
Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of the Israeli-based Batsheva Dance Company will receive the 2009 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth is reporting. Naharin, who studied and worked with dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, has directed the innovative modern dance troupe since 1990. In addition to his choreography, Naharin…
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‘American Idol’ Frontrunner Pays Tribute to Rabin
Years before Adam Lambert, this season’s “American Idol” frontrunner, made Simon Cowell go weak at the knees, he sang Shir Lashalom alongside Noa Dori and Maya Haddi at a 2005 Yitzhak Rabin tribute concert: A year earlier, Lambert won rave reviews for his performance as Joshua in a musical version of “The Ten Commandments,” staged…
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Turning His Lens on the ADL
Controversy isn’t new terrain for Yoav Shamir. And controversy is the likely response to “Defamation,” his new documentary focused on anti-Zionism, antisemitism and the Arab-Israeli conflict, among other lightning rods. The Anti-Defamation League and its director, Abraham Foxman, figure prominently in the film, as do “Holocaust Industry” author Norman Finkelstein and a group of Israeli…
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