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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Public Displays of Piety Are In Fashion, Thank God
Back in June, I clipped an article by New York Times Egyptian correspondent Michael Slackman about the increasingly ubiquitous use of the word inshallah in Egyptian Arabic. Inshallah is a compression of the three words, in sha’a allah, “if God wills,” and it is widely used by speakers of all dialects of Arabic when referring…
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September 19, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The Tshernovitz Yiddish Conference is one of those events that have attempted to stress the value and importance of our mameloshn, that one-time “jargon,” and to give it a place among the languages of Europe. During the past 25 years, much has occurred, the most important of which has…
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Bodies in Motion, Separate Solitudes
How does dance begin? “You are who you are. Your spirit received a certain body because you were chosen to,” said choreographer Noa Sagie, 24. “Just accept it. Take what you have and do what you can with it. The magic is discovering you can do anything you want with it. But if you don’t…
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The Poet Who Invented Himself
Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet By Nili Scharf Gold Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 424 pages, $35. Even to those who have no Hebrew, the name “Yehuda Amichai” might sound like a line of poetry, and poetry, at its best, should communicate through sound alone. But Yehuda is also Hebrew…
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Songs of a Lost Tribe’s Longing
In the Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, far in the northeast near the Burmese border, some 7,000 people observe the Jewish Sabbath, kosher dietary laws and rules of family purity. Already, 1,400 of these people, known as Bnei Menashe, have immigrated to Israel. The remaining 7,000 wish to join their brethren as soon as…
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Art Spiegelman’s Original Stories, Now Shown in a New Light
Breakdowns: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&!” By Art Spiegelman Pantheon Books, 72 pages, $27.50. When the artist Art Spiegelman published “Breakdowns” in 1978, it came out in a limited edition of about 3,000 copies. As Spiegelman recalls, “There was no demand for a deluxe large-format album that collected the scattered handful…
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Is the Dialect of Vilna Yiddish the One We Want To Rely On?
Paul Malevitz writes from Los Angeles: “For well over 70 years now, the standard dialect taught in Yiddish schools has been and still is the ‘northeastern’ one, similar if not always identical to that which was spoken in Vilna. (One difference is that in Vilna Yiddish, veynen can mean both ‘to reside’ and ‘to cry.’…
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September 12, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Last week, some of the greatest Yiddish writers and cultural figures gathered in Tshernovitz, Bukovina, for the first-ever Yiddish language conference. To be honest, it didn’t seem like something that would ever come to fruition. In fact, the American Yiddish press was mostly indifferent to the conference and essentially…
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The Bittersweet Legacy of a Rich Man’s Looted Art
Reclaimed: Paintings From the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker By Peter C. Sutton Yale University Press, 224 pages, $60. Despite its encouraging title, there are two Holocaust tragedies in “Reclaimed: Paintings From the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker,” an often-stunning book about the recovery of artworks looted from a Dutch dealer. One is obvious: the loss of…
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Scholar Probes the Way (and Not the Why) of Judaism
Jonathan Sarna, the Brandeis University scholar known best as a historian of American Jewry, departs from his usual field in his book “A Time to Every Purpose: Letters to a Young Jew,” set for release this month as part of Basic Books’ Art of Mentoring series. Rather than explore the popular question “Why be Jewish?”…
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Cleveland’s Multiethnic Eden
The greening of America has assumed all sorts of forms of late, from heightened attentiveness to the kinds of foods we put on our table and the cars we drive to reusing sheets and towels while on vacation, a gesture in the direction of “conserving our country’s natural resources,” or so guests at Hilton Hotels…
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