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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July 24, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Unemployed worker Harry Rosenthal was hungry and thought it would be easy to lie down in the street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and pretend he was dying of hunger. Police on Elizabeth Street bought his act and had him brought to the station, where he was fed and…
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Unstunned
Brooklyn’s community of Syrian Jews — defensive, insular, affluent and bound by a 75-year-old edict that forces excommunication upon anyone intermarrying — is a big and mysterious subject, one ripe for dramatizing. Zev Chafets’s excellent article about it, “The Sy Empire,” which ran in The New York Times Magazine in 2007, had odd and arresting…
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Einstein and Complex Analyses of Zionism
Judaism Does Not Equal Israel By Marc Ellis The New Press 232 pp. $24.95 Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East. By Fred Jerome. St. Martin’s Press. 334 pp. $25.95 ‘The Arabs have attacked us unexpectedly, wanted to destroy our settlement work, have murdered and plundered,” Chaim Weizmann wrote in…
The Latest
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Lutz Triumphant
Another Bastille Day passes with fireworks in France, political turmoil in Italy and a romantic comedy topping the American box office. This year, though, the romcom in question is not a grand marnier soufflé of warm, fluffy intoxication but a raw, slightly awkward, pas de deux between a self-obsessed fashion journalist and the klutzy Lutz…
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Women’s Professional Soccer Has a New Jewish Star
Three short-lived seasons of The Women’s United Soccer Association, which folded in 2003, left American fans distraught, but Women’s soccer is trying again. The Women’s Professional Soccer league debuted in April with seven teams, no television deals, and a substantially smaller budget. Some are dubious that it will ever make real money, writing it off…
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Fiddler Without a Roof
At the recent Montreal International Yiddish Theatre Festival, Itzik Gottesman of the Yiddish Forward spoke with Shmuel Atzmon, the founder and director of Yiddishpiel Theater in Tel Aviv about the future of Yiddish theater in Israel. A video about Atzmon and his work follows: To watch a recent forward.com video about the Montreal International Yiddish…
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Excerpt: Alice Eve Cohen’s ‘What I Thought I Knew’
Scene 1 Stage Fright This was going to be a solo show. That’s what I do. I write and perform solo plays. Dramatic tales with multiple characters, for adults. Comic plays and folktales, for children. I’ve performed for half a million people, in tiny theaters and high- tech performance spaces, in international theater festivals and…
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Taking the A Train to ‘The Fourth Reich’
In 2008, the German city of Munich celebrated its 850th birthday amid much fanfare, and various cultural institutions were asked to mark the occasion. When the recently opened Jewish Museum was approached, it reacted with ambivalence. Indeed, for nearly half the history of Munich — more than 400 years — Jews were excluded from taking…
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Luftmenschen Take to the Airwaves
Station Identification: A Cultural History Of Yiddish Radio In The United States By Ari Y. Kelman University of California Press, 279 pages, $39.95 Now that the exuberantly noisy klezmer revival has joined the cresting domestic use of Yiddish, as well as the rise in academic studies of Yiddish language, literature and culture, it is good…
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Feeding the Body Politic
Long before Americans discovered the virtues of vegetables, these gifts of the soil loomed large on the modern Jewish landscape. Within Jewish circles, “Eat Your Vegetables” was not only the rallying cry of nutrition-minded mothers, but also a Zionist imperative — the stuff of moral regeneration. Adding fruits and vegetables to one’s diet, it seemed,…
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‘We Found a Baby in You’
What I Thought I Knew By Alice Eve Cohen Viking, 208 pages, $24.95 One of the few certainties in Alice Eve Cohen’s life was her infertility, the result of her mother taking the synthetic hormone DES while she was pregnant, before the drug’s potential for fetal damage was widely known. At the age of 44…
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