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 3, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Like a conquering army, the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side were filled with thousands of white-capped, white-shirted bakers waving red flags and beaming with joy at the final settling of their strike. Thousands of well-wishers lined the streets to cheer them on and to listen to the bands…
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The Art Of Memory
The sparkling glass walls of the new Derfner Judaica Museum look out across the Hudson River by way of a sculpture garden on a rolling green lawn. Look back, and you see the impressive contemporary art collection of the Hebrew Home at Riverdale. The museum’s clean, modern design, by architect Louise Braverman, looks to the…
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Reb Zalman’s Ah-ha Hasidism
Ahron’s Heart: The Prayers, Teachings and Letters of Ahrele Roth, a Hasidic Reformer By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Yair Hillel Goelman Ben Yehudah Press, 150 pages, $14.95. A Heart Afire: Stories and Teachings of the Early Hasidic Masters By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Netanel Miles-Yepez The Jewish Publication Society, 384 pages, $45.00. Contemporary American religion is filled…
The Latest
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Eliot’s Zionism Before Zionism
The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot By Gertrude Himmelfarb Encounter Books, 180 pages, $25.95. In the recent speech he delivered in Cairo to the Muslim world, President Obama declared that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” Is the legitimacy of Zionism based primarily on past…
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Wild Grass Grows High
Last Christmas, a group of very lapsed Jews gathered around a table of very treyf *Chinese food — in China, for good measure. Eventually, someone remembered that it was the fifth night of Hanukkah, too. Soon, a low-rent menorah punched out of sheet metal was produced from a battered Chabad box, and candles were lit….
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Tupac in Tehran
In the Land of the Ayatollahs Tupac Shakur Is King: Reflections from Iran and the Arab World By Shahzad Aziz Amal Press, 296 pages, $14.95. Albanian music is amazing. Still, in the spring of 2007, I bypassed racks of polyphonic folk and clarinet-led pop in a market cassette stall in Korce, Albania, to spend 2,000…
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Neurotic Parenting in America
American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland By Sam Apple Ballantine Books, 320 pages, $25.00 The symptoms of new parenthood are almost indistinguishable from those of psychosis: insomnia, depression, paranoia, mood swings. For those of us lucky enough to still have jobs, working and parenting also means moving seamlessly to diapers from…
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What’s Working for Woody?
There is no talking about this Woody Allen movie without talking about Woody. But before I get into that, I’d rather assert how much I admire him — for his achievements, of course, and for how, at the relatively advanced age of 73, he is still making interesting movies. Like Philip Roth, his rough contemporary,…
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On the Trail of Deep Throat
Walter Askinas writes from Boynton Beach, Fla.: “My late father, born in Kovno Gubernya [the tsarist province of Kaunas in Lithuania], used to say about someone whose actions he deplored, ‘Er meg zakh shemn in vaytn haldz.’ I always understood exactly what he meant, but not the origin of the expression. Can you elucidate it?”…
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June 26, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward The streets of Jerusalem are full of fury, as it was discovered that the holy city has been dirtied by the publication of a new Yiddish newspaper. To make matters worse, Hebrew had just begun to get a foothold, and now this. The Hebraists are up in arms. What’s…
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Bringing Up Kids in America
Sam Apple is a modern journeyman who curiously encounters the world with pen in hand. First, he trailed a Yiddish-singing sheepherder through tiny villages in Austria to write “Schlepping Through the Alps.” Now, Apple tackles the bug-eyed wow of becoming a first-time father in his new memoir, “American Parent.” Allison Gaudet Yarrow: Who is the…
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