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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Music
Madonna On The Hidden World: From Material Girl to Queen Esther
In her first of what she promises will be a regular column for Yediot Ahronot Madonna has explained how she was turned on to Kabbalah. She notes how her fame and global traveling hadn’t helped “when it came to trying to understand why people suffered in the world or what the meaning of life was…
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August 7, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward Two sisters, 18- and 19-year-old Rebecca and Annie Abrams, were sitting in a Philadelphia park, relaxing and talking with a friend, when suddenly they were attacked by a group of hobos. Although there were numerous people milling about, no one offered help when the Abrams sisters called out for…
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Superbad
Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-creator Joe Shuster Edited by Craig Yoe, with an Introduction by Stan Lee Abrams ComicArts, 160 pages, $24.95. Who knew that Joe Shuster (1914-1992), the Cleveland Jewish teenage artist of the Depression Era, rising from obscurity through his portrayal of The Man of Steel, would become in later…
The Latest
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Let’s Talk About Sex
The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism Edited By Danya Ruttenberg New York University Press, 320 pages, $19.95. Jewish attitudes about sex and sexuality span a wide spectrum. For liberal Jews, sex and religion may seem unrelated; for those who follow the family-purity laws, the relationship between sex and Jewish tradition may seem set in stone….
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Excerpt: Brigid Pasulka’s ‘A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True’
The pigeon was not one to sit around and pine, and so the day after he saw the beautiful Anielica Hetmanska up on Old Baldy Hill, he went to talk to her father. The Pigeon’s village was two hills and three valleys away, and he came upon her only by Providence, or “by chance,” as…
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How Much Remains?
The Essays of Leonard Michaels By Leonard Michaels Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 204 pages, $26. Writers’ careers are stories in themselves; sad, strange or thrilling ones may even eclipse the writing that made them worth telling in the first place. The story that has crystallized around Leonard Michaels bears repeating because “The Essays of Leonard…
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Mr. Tambourine Man
Until the Van Gogh of finger-painting comes along, your best chance of seeing a kindergarten toy played with virtuoso skill is to catch David Buchbut, from the group Layali El Andalus, playing the tambourine. I first saw him in New York during a short concert he gave accompanying Iraqi-Israeli oud player Yair Dalal. The audience…
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Essential Inauthenticity: Narrative Nostalgia Revisited
A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True By Brigid Pasulka *Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 368 pages, $25.00. * A new literary genre has been making waves recently — one that might be called the narrative of nostalgia. Think Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon and Gary Shteyngart, to name just a few authors who,…
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Another Velvet Fog Summer
Mel Tormé (1925–1999) was the Art Tatum of singers: a daredevil improviser with equally flawless chops and remarkable harmonic smarts, he would take a tune and break it down into 1,000 glistening arpeggios, then put it back together in a way that often improved on the original. Like Tatum, he could do all this without…
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The New York Times: Ignorant and Antisemitic?
“Pharisees on the Potomac” is the headline from a July 18 attack by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on what she considers to be the moral hypocrisy — “the ancient political art of Tartuffery,” as she calls it — of Republican Party leaders on Capitol Hill. Let’s stay away from politics. Let’s even stay…
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Letting Go of a Dark Thing
Boaz Yakin is the award-winning director of “Fresh” (1994), “Price Above Rubies” (1998) and “Remember the Titans” (2000). His latest film, “Death in Love” — which he not only wrote, produced and directed, but also funded with his life savings — has just been released to mixed reviews. It deals with the psychological traumas that…
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באַזונדערש רירנדיק דאָ זײַנען די בילדער פֿון משפּחה־רײַבונגען, פֿון באַגעגענישן װאָס ברענגען נישט צו קײן עמאָציאָנעלע פֿאַרשטענדיקונגען.
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