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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How Jews Harshed the Hilarity
In “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905), Sigmund Freud observes that a strict superego — or the conscience that punishes misbehavior — results in a correspondingly aggressive jest. As we all have found, whether at school or in the workplace, the harshest superego suppresses laughs entirely. In practical comedic terms, jokes get meaner…
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Triple Threat
Despite her successful career as a singer, actor, comedian and author, Rain Pryor is most frequently identified as the daughter of the famously outspoken African-American comedian Richard Pryor and Jewish dancer Shirley Bonus. But Pryor’s parentage and upbringing have given her a wealth of her own material. She has explored that material in her one-woman…
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Podcast: Mind and Body Poet
An image is everything. It is what poet, essayist, and all around lauded writer, Katha Pollitt first draws on when crafting her poems. She has a new collection of poetry, “The Mind-Body Problem,” out this month. Pollitt may be a long time columnist for The Nation, but her new poems are hardly political. Instead, her…
The Latest
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Film & TV Surreal Mosaic Family
A mark of the strangeness of the film “In a Dream” is that the dramatic revelation of Isaiah Zagar’s sexual abuse as a child is almost immediately forgotten in our journey through the roiling psychic storm that is his mind. For make no mistake, although this follows a family (filmed from the inside by his…
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June 12, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward Yankev Gordin is dead. Endless numbers of people have received the news with a sharp pain and with tears in their eyes. But for us, for the radicals, his death is especially painful. Gordin, with his literary activity, belonged to our radical circle. He was one of the best-known,…
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Our Crowd
In Dori Carter’s luxurious and leafy Southern California town of Rancho Esperanza, the setting for her second book, everyone knows the neighbor’s social status, but nobody knows each other — or, it seems, themselves. “We Are Rich” (Other Press) is, at once, a novel and collection of short stories — 12 chapters and 12 first-person…
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Jewish Revenge Porn
Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” (complete with unexplained directorial spelling caprice) is pure Cineplex whimsy where bloodthirsty Jewish soldiers destroy the Third Reich, gleefully giving their tormentors a taste of their own medicine. Eli Roth who plays Sergeant Donny Donowitz, aka The Bear Jew, quickly embraced Tarantino’s wild re-imagining of history, which premiered at the Cannes…
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The Holocaust: Director’s Cut
After nearly 50 years of movies about suffering and Nazi brutality, the Jews are finally, apparently, winning the Holocaust. With “Inglourious Basterds,” the Jews of the cinematic Holocaust have at last thrust aside moral or philosophical victories for a good old-fashioned ass-kicking. This development has been some time in coming. Quentin Tarantino’s latest phantasmagoria comes…
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Why Straight People Go to Gay Synagogues
In the next few weeks, gay and lesbian synagogues and Jewish organizations will be marching in New York, San Francisco and other cities around the country as part of gay pride parades. But many of the people marching won’t be gay themselves: More and more “gay” or GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) synagogues have…
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My Name is Apostle Lev
I wasn’t thinking about Mormons on March 4, when I tweeted about my review of “My Name is Asher Lev.” Thirty-six minutes later, I heard from William Morris, an expert on Mormon arts and culture. “Excellent review,” Morris noted. “For (I believe) obvious reasons, ‘My Name Is Asher Lev’ is very popular with Mormon writers…
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Looking at Hezbollah With Hamas in Mind
Hezbollah: A Short History By Augustus Richard Norton Princeton University Press, 216 pages, $12.95. Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah Edited by Nicholas Noe, translated by Ellen Khouri Verso, 420 pages, $19.95. Hezbollah: The Story of the Party of God By Eitan Azani Palgrave Macmillan, 308 pages, $89.95. With the elections in…
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