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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Art and Apocrypha: The Fraught Beauty of the Dead Sea Scrolls
They survived, untouched, for nearly two millennia, but the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been, since their discovery in 1947, fraught with controversy. Ownership, religious patrimony, Christian-Jewish relations and the odor of antisemitism emanating from some Christian scholars who controlled access to the scrolls — these have roiled the academic and public-affairs worlds…
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December 5, 2008
100 Years Ago in the Forward An interesting and unusual case is currently before the courts in Warsaw. The editor of the Polish newspaper S.L. Kempner is being sued by a tailor named Yosef Cohen for reporting in the paper that in order to get out of paying rent, Cohen spread a rumor that ghosts…
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Defined by Quality
Concerts and CDs featuring composers who died during the Holocaust have become commonplace, with such once forgotten names as Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944), Pavel Haas (1899–1944) and Gideon Klein (1919–1945) receiving posthumous tributes. Yet these honors, sincere and well deserved as they undoubtedly are, tend to type composers and their music in the somber region of…
The Latest
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Symphonies Lost and Found
You would have thought that musicians who escaped fascist Germany would feel liberated to compose in freedom. Not so. Restarting a career in a new country at any time is full of pitfalls, and even outside Germany, conservative musical tendencies in the 1930s were equated, rightly or wrongly, with the Nazi rejection of “degenerate” art….
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Being a Profound Critical Analysis of Contemporary Jewish Comedic Literature
Jew-Jitsu: The Hebrew Hands of Fury By Rabbi Daniel Eliezer and Paul Kupperberg Citadel, 112 pages, $12.95. Shtick Shift: Jewish Humor in the 21st Century By Simcha Weinstein Barricade Books, 192 pages, $15.95. How To Profit From the Coming Rapture: Getting Ahead When You’re Left Behind By Steve and Evie Levy, as told to Ellis…
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Manners Maketh the Mensch
Our previous installment looked at how Yiddish will often use the third person as a sign of respect. Day-to-day use of the third person in addressing male strangers is pretty much restricted to der yeed, “the Jew,” which is sometimes used instead of reb yeed, “Mister Jew,” in addressing strangers. IKH MIZ BAITN BEI DAIM…
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California: Made in Germany, by Jews
California has always been different from every other place not only in America, but also in the world. The Golden State’s human landscape has been as spectacularly varied as its natural one, a unique blending of dreamers, strivers, crackpots and hustlers. Perhaps nowhere is this historical divergence more notable than in the history of California’s…
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A Turn of Phrase
David Gruber writes from Win–nipeg, Manitoba: “I have recently encountered a new use of the word ‘trope.’ The first instance was a commentator describing a politician deviating from his party’s platform as ‘not following the party trope.’ The second, in an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail*, was the sentence ‘A Cameron Diaz character…
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November 28, 2008
100 Years Ago in the Forward Police are currently investigating the murder-suicide that occurred in New York City at 123 Clinton Street, in the apartment of Max and Molly Goldstein. As it appears, following a fight, Max, a 75-year-old pushcart peddler, stabbed his wife to death and then killed himself. The couple’s boarders said that…
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God in the Dock: Auschwitz Inmates Look To Apportion Ultimate Blame
Why do bad things happen to good people? The fact that this question is a cliché doesn’t make it any less pressing. Especially when we’re talking about the Shoah, which was bad in ways that we still have a hard time imagining. The question is one theme of “God on Trial,” the made-for-TV movie that…
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Jesus, Bob: To Live Outside the Law You Must Be Honest
Of all the intangible elements contributing to Bob Dylan’s sustaining genius — prodigious recall of the breadth and depth of American song; a restless, creative spirit, and abiding intellectual curiosity — none has been more powerful than his ability to confound expectations. Pop vocalists on the radio were not supposed to sing through their noses,…
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