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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Leonard Cohen’s Ambiguous ‘Hallelujahs’
On February 19, famed Canadian Jewish singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, 74, will be performing his first New York concert in more than 15 years. Cohen’s song “Hallelujah,” rife with biblical imagery, has recently been revived for a new generation on such reality shows as “American Idol” and Britain’s “The X-Factor,” where young listeners refer to it…
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February 27, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward A man walked into the offices of the Forward and told us the following: “My name is Sam Engelman, and I come from Toronto, Canada. Every Sunday for the past two weeks, my picture has appeared in your Gallery of Disappeared Men. I felt very bad upon seeing my…
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Senior Center
Light here is old, suspended cloudy, from the cathedral ceiling, far above the somehow brighter sheen of its reflection on the checkered linoleum, on the backing and thick legs of the metal chairs around the bridge tables, the mah jong tables, the bingo tables— light stumbles, it seems, it gropes, not so much from the…
The Latest
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Celebrated Collection of Hebrew Texts on View, on Sale
Jack Lunzer, whose private collection of more than 11,000 Hebrew books and manuscripts is on display at the New York auction house Sotheby’s until February 19, has a line he often repeats: “When two or three Jews get together, they buy a printing press.” The Valmadonna Trust Library, which is valued at more than $40…
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The Aesthetics of Violence Examined
Following the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was caught musing that the event was “the greatest work of art that is possible,” a statement that provoked widespread outrage and led to the cancellation of several concerts of his work. Though New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini, among others,…
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Eliran Scores a Stunner
Eliran Atar, his immense talent rescued from a life of petty crime, scores an amazing goal in the Israeli soccer league. Bnei Yehuda (in orange) are the gutsy underdogs from the wrong side of the tracks playing against Maccabi Netanya, the third-best team in the country — owned by the millionaire Daniel Jammer and coached…
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Martin Munkacsi: The Prodigal Archives
To see him roaming the halls of Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1960s, poor and desperate for commissions, it must have been hard to believe that only a few decades earlier, Martin Munkacsi was one of the world’s highest-paid photographers. During a 2007 retrospective of his work, shown in New York at the International Center…
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You Shoot, He Scores: The Kibbutz King of Komposers
“My grandparents drained swamps and established Kibbutz Merchavia in northern Israel. My father, an actor/director, and my mother, a teacher/poet, lived on it and raised three sons there… They divorced when I was 20. I moved to Tel Aviv to study at the Music Academy and was advised by my guru, ‘There’s nothing more for…
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Animated Catharsis
Despite eight nominations spanning 44 years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has never bestowed its award for best foreign language film on an Israeli picture. Many expect that this will change this year at the 81st Annual Academy Awards, to be aired February 22, thanks to the nomination of “Waltz With Bashir.”…
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Spit Your Way To Safety: Toi, toi, toi!
On my way to tomatoes this morning, I was sidetracked by expectorations. If that seems like an odd thing to happen, let me explain. It all began with a letter from Forward reader Herbert Hoffman, who wanted to know the derivation of the Yiddish word for “tomato,” pomedor. *Although I knew the answer, I wasn’t…
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Books Chagall’s Political Art
Suspended in white space, a goat romps and a rooster struts across a modest book cover. Beneath them, running right to left, is the Yiddish word “mayselekh” — less a title than a simple description of what’s inside: two little stories for children. The book, which is more like a pamphlet, is small enough to…
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