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 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
The Latest
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Fêting the Yiddish Stage
Itzik Gottesman, associate editor of the Yiddish Forward, reports on the first-ever Montreal International Yiddish Theater Festival, an event that brought together troupes from Poland, Romania, Israel, France and New York: To watch the video in Yiddish, click here. To watch a forward.com video about Yiddish theater in Israel, click here.
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Audio: Heard by the Whole Tribe
The Beijing New Music Ensemble is the only independent musical ensemble dedicated to new music in China. Lead by Eli Marshall, who Nick Frisch called “the most prominent Jewish musician based in East Asia” in a recent Forward article, this young and vibrant group of diverse backgrounds has performed across greater China and in South…
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Israeli Rock Finds Religion
‘I feel like a fish that spent its entire life in an aquarium and has suddenly discovered the sea,” Kobi Oz enthused, prior to going onstage with his new set, “Psalms for the Perplexed,” all of it written after several years of his “soaking in the rich marinade of Judaism.” The excitement of Oz, former…
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Excuse Me, Have You Seen My Alps?
Before embarking on a trip to Switzerland in the 1880s, the great rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch is reported to have said, “When I shall stand before God, the Eternal One will ask me with pride: Did you see my Alps?” This apocryphal quote is the jumping-off point for a new exhibit at the Jewish Museum…
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Bob Dylan’s Mystical Midrash
The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan Edited by Kevin J.H. Dettmar Cambridge University Press, 204 pages, $24.95. Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957–1973 By Clinton Heylin Chicago Review Press, 496 pages, $29.95. In his landmark work, “The Prophets,” theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “The prophet is a person who, living in…
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Getting to the ‘Bottom’ of a Kiwi Query
This column’s first letter from New Zealand is surely cause for celebration. It comes from Daniel Meyrowitz of Auckland, who writes: “I have an inquiry about what I assume to be a Yiddish word, ‘unterdetzura’ or ‘interdeshira.’ I gather from the context in conversation that it means something like the English idiom ‘the long and…
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Part V: Writing in My Father’s Footsteps
After the battle at Tamra, my father’s commander, Norm Schutzman, moved the men of B-Company up to the coast North of Haifa for more training. In late fall, Schutzman received orders that the entire 7th Brigade, including his company, was to clear the Galilee of Arab troops to the Lebanese border. Schutzman’s company’s assignment was…
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Youngish, Yiddish and Staging a Revival
Yiddish was alive and doing quite well, for a sure few hours, at a synagogue on the edge of downtown Philadelphia. Onstage, six performers — in their 20s and 30s, which constitutes young for Yiddish speakers — were speaking the centuries-old language of European Jews with ease. The jokes were flying. The music was piping….
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