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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County Fare
Forward reader Donald Allen, having come across a reference in a column of mine several weeks ago to “Kovno *gubernya,” *the czarist province of Kaunas in Lithuania, writes: “When I was growing up, my father, born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1895, always told me that his father and mother were from ‘Givilney gubernya,’ probably close…
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July 17, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Jumping up onto a tabletop in the mess hall of Ellis Island, one of the immigrants yelled out: “No one could eat breakfast today. The food they give us here isn’t fit for pigs. We are treated here like wild animals, kept in cages and given rotting food to…
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From the Kol Israel Orchestra to a Pygmy Choir
If any novelist wrote a tale about a young Israeli orchestral musician who became a world expert on the music of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa, thereby directly influencing Steve Reich, Herbie Hancock and Madonna, readers would deem the story unlikely. Yet this is exactly what happened to the veteran French-Israeli musicologist Simha Arom…
The Latest
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A Climb, a Crime and a Debut Novel
The Jump Artist By Austin Ratner Bellevue Literary Press, 256 pages, $14.95. On September 10, 1928, a Latvian Jew was bludgeoned to death as he and his son hiked the Tyrolean Alps. The man’s son, Philipp Halsmann, 22 years old at the time, was convicted of the murder and spent the next two years in…
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Allowing the Yetzer Tov To Win
It happens to me every day. Although I know that yoga, meditation, exercise or prayer will make me feel better than updating my Facebook status or grabbing a snack, I have to fight myself to do them. If the yetzer tov (the “good” side) wins and I do my spiritual practice, eventually I won’t remember…
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Film & TV Man’s (Comedic) Search for Meaning
On September 11, 2001, Harold Ramis was in a car making its way through the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn — the heart of the Satmar Hasidic community — watching as people covered in ash from the just-fallen Twin Towers came streaming over the bridges from Lower Manhattan. “We got to Williamsburg, and the Hasidim were…
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What do the Egg, the Swan and the Ant Have in Common?
Appraisals of Arne Jacobsen’s life and work rarely take his Jewish background into account. But the 50th anniversary this year of Copenhagen’s Royal Hotel, one of the Modernist architect’s landmark achievements, presents an opportunity to reconsider a towering figure of 20th-century design — and how wartime experiences may have colored Jacobsen’s work. A nonpracticing Jew,…
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‘Settling’ the Score
In a long opinion piece column in the June 22 New York Times, New York University professor Tony Judt — who in recent years has been only slightly better-disposed toward the State of Israel than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — writes about the settlements in the occupied territories. Essentially, he claims, they are a continuation of the…
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July 10, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Seltzer is far and away the most popular drink on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As a result of the beverage’s popularity, seltzer bottlers work overtime. But most seltzer drinkers are not familiar with the dangerous realities of working in a seltzer factory. Accidents are daily occurrences, and workers come…
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Excerpt: Austin Ratner’s ‘The Jump Artist’
I think, however, that on a beautiful winter day, immediately after a snowstorm, when millions of coniferæ, bowed down beneath their crystal burdens, render the mountains dazzling with silver-powdered forests and pyramids of prisms, this journey offers one of the most glorious sights I have ever looked upon… . For this old thoroughfare is a…
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Iranian Intelligence Ministry Thinks George Soros and John McCain Are Buddies
Here’s a video broadcast by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, subtitled by Memri. Very “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Very “Protocols.” Very creepy. (Though the production values are very lousy.) Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan’s blog
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