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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Mayer Before the Nightmare
Born in 1916 in Opatów (Apt in Yiddish), Poland, Mayer Kirshenblatt was 73 when he began to paint, but his pictures have the sunny guilelessness of a peaceful childhood in Poland. They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust, currently at the Jewish Museum in New York,…
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Picturing Exhibition Collectors
A chance encounter at a Parisian cocktail party brought novelist Sara Houghteling together with the woman whose family would serve as the subject of her first novel. Chatting with a lawyer, Houghteling mentioned her work in progress, which would study the efforts of a prominent French family of art dealers to recover works of art…
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Yes We Kana’i
Writing about the Zealots, the rebels who, according to Jewish historian Josephus Flavius (who lived from about 37 to 100 C.E), fought to the death in Jerusalem against the Romans in the Great Revolt of 67–70 C.E., which ended with the destruction of the Second Temple, Jay P. Mayesh of New York City asks: “*Zelotes…
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May 29, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward Israel Zangwill, leader of the Jewish Territorialist Organization, has come up with a new homeland for the Jews. After the failure of Uganda a number of years ago, Zangwill has now decided that Mesopotamia will serve as a successful homeland for the Jewish people. The Forward editorializes that this…
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Sana Krasikov: Inspiration All Her Own
Coming to America was an “exciting adventure” for the Ukraine-born, Georgia-reared writer Sana Krasikov, who was eight when her family immigrated in 1987. But in her widely praised collection of short stories “One More Year” (Spiegel & Grau, 2008), Krasikov writes of less seamless, more traumatic transitions of Russian-speaking émigrés. On the heels of the…
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Books Kindling Desire
The only meaning listed in the Oxford English Dictionary for the noun “kindle” is: “The young (of any animal), a young one.” And, despite Amazon’s best efforts, it’s still much easier to find out that information on my phone or my PC than it is on their own Kindle. For those who haven’t yet been…
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Boys, Books and Bildungsroman
I was shocked when I interviewed novelist and Columbia creative writing professor Gary Shteyngart last year and he remarked on how many men write but how few men read novels — statistically speaking. As someone for whom novel-reading is a constitutive pursuit, this gendering of reading sounded absurd. All through high school, college and grad…
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Excerpt: Peter Manseau’s ‘Rag and Bone’
© 2009 by Peter Manseau. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC This is a book about dismembered toes, splinters of shinbone, stolen bits of hair, burned remnants of an anonymous rib cage, and other odds and ends of human remains, but it is not a book about death. Around every one of…
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Words That Shape the Jewish Future
Peter Manseau is drawn to preserving civilizations that, to many, seem long gone. Raised stringently Catholic — his parents met while his father was a priest and his mother was a nun — Manseau’s first job out of college was at the National Jewish Book Center. That gig proved to be a critical introduction to…
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The Lessons of Leo Frank
The sole lynching of a Jew on American soil is a story that many do not know. On April 27, 1913, a young girl, Mary Phagan, was found strangled at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta. Leo Frank, her Jewish supervisor from New York, claimed to be the last to see her alive, and was…
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Shake a Family Tree And a Jew Falls Out
On a Thursday morning, I stop by the restaurant Shoarma Tel Aviv on the way to visit an ancient Jewish cemetery. Friday night, I attend services at an 18th-century synagogue. The restaurant is owned by a Hindustani, and the floor of the synagogue is covered with sand. Where am I? If you guessed Suriname, congratulations…
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