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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Abe Foxworthy
Meet the redneck who’s paranoid about antisemites. Click on the thumbnail to the right for a larger version: Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His column, “Comics Rescued From a Burning Synagogue in Bialystok and Hidden in a Salt Mine Until After the War,” appears monthly in The Forward. His Web site is www.evcomics.com.
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Thoroughly Modern Marranos?
The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity By Yirmiyahu Yovel Princeton University Press, 488 pages, $24.95. Diego Arias was born a Jew in 15th-century Spain, but his parents converted him to Catholicism following a wave of anti-Jewish persecution. Later in life, as royal chief financier of Castile, and one of the most…
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Succeeding Yourself Out of Business
As graduations fill our calendars and graduates fill our thoughts, it’s a good time to reflect on the state of higher education within the American Jewish community — or, more to the point, on the changes that have defined that academic landscape over the past century. Judaic studies, it’s true, are thriving beyond anyone’s wildest…
The Latest
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The Path on Which Funny Will Happen
Comedian Yisrael Campbell likes to get the crowd warmed up during his stand-up routines by using a little bit of background: “I grew up vaguely Catholic. ‘How Catholic?’ people always ask me. Well, Catholic enough to know I was going to hell.” He goes on, “I’m the firstborn son of a manic depressive Italian woman…
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A Sensitive Finger On the Pulse of Politics
Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics By David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 144 pages. $18.00. In the wake of the Israeli elections and their policy ramifications, reading this essay collection, which is composed mostly of material written in the past couple of years, occasioned a certain vertigo:…
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Mexican Flu: The Other White Meat
There’s not much that’s funny about swine flu, but ultra-Orthodox Knesset member Ya’akov Litzman, acting head of Israel’s health ministry, has given us some comic relief. Repeatedly referring to the disease at a press conference April 27 as the “Mexican flu,” Litzman studiously avoided all mention of “swine” as if the very word were nonkosher,…
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May 15, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward The recent uprisings in Turkey have included a number of Jewish activists, among them those who have supported the old regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid and those who have fought against it. Those who have aligned themselves with the Young Turks and the prospect of constitutional government in Turkey…
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Chagall’s Comrades
In January 1929, Theater Arts Monthly announced that the Moscow State Yiddish Theater would arrive that month in New York with six plays, including I.L. Peretz’s “At Night in the Old Marketplace” and Sholom Aleichem’s “200,000.” The troupe never arrived that month, nor did it arrive before 1949, when the Kremlin, which had also prohibited…
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Film & TV Lainie Kazan’s ‘Oy Vey’ Moment
Filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky’s “Oy Vey, My Son Is Gay,” slated to be released this fall, offers the exact story line that the title suggests: overbearing Jewish mother from Long Island (Lainie Kazan) hurls eligible Jewish bachelorettes at her nice, but (no-so-secretly) gay son, Nelson (John Lloyd Young). But Nelson is already in a relationship — with…
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Part IV: Writing in My Father’s Footsteps
Prior to the arrival of my father and the first wave of Machalniks in May 1948, the fledgling Israeli army had taken huge losses. These losses weren’t simply because the soldiers were heavily outnumbered, but because the Israeli army had not yet become a unit: It was still a disorganized patchwork quilt of antagonistic freedom…
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Do Jews Have a Jesus Problem?
The joke, if that’s what it is, goes like this: “You’ll have to forgive us Jews for being a little nervous. Two thousand years of Christian love have worn down our nerves.” That says it all, doesn’t it? The scars of antisemitism and missionary activity, the pathos-drenched sense of humor, the contempt for Christianity —…
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