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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Books
The Poetry of Language
There are many bilingual Jewish books in which the two languages are dependent on each other. The Gemara is a mostly Aramaic reworking of the Hebrew-language Mishnah. The stories of Reb Nachman of Breslov were told in Yiddish, but their first written versions were in Hebrew. The majority of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work is now…
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Books Kids Lit: More Yiddish Books Begin To Sprout
Let’s say you’re raising your children in Yiddish and you want to buy them some books. What do you do? If you walk into the children’s section of any bookstore, you’ll be deluged with a huge number of engaging, beautifully illustrated books, from board books to chapter books to beautifully rendered pop-ups. But none of…
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Books Book Center Goes Digital
Long faced with extinction, Yiddish literature has been preserved for the digital age with a newly activated online archive. Since the beginning of February, more than 10,000 titles have been available for browsing, skimming and study via the National Yiddish Book Center, an Amherst, Mass., collection that includes more than one million volumes that have…
The Latest
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Books A Book of Insults — Exploring Yiddish Curses
If the classic Yiddish imprecation has an inverse, it is the Irish blessing. While the Gaelic bards gaily start benedictions with “May…” before politely wishing their recipient good fortune (“May the wind be always at your back; May the sun shine warm upon your face”), the Yiddish curse is a spell of invective, typically cast…
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Books Sholom Aleichem: Finding Freedom in America
‘Wandering Stars,” Yiddish master Sholom Aleichem’s comic novel about the Yiddish theater, has just been published in a new translation by Aliza Shevrin. The novel tells the story of Leibl and Reizel, two talented teenagers who flee their backwater shtetl with the help of a traveling Yiddish theater troupe. Sweethearts separated by corrupt theater companies,…
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The Wittgensteins and the Waughs: A Tale of Two Unhappy Houses
Very few people can claim to understand all the ideas that Vienna-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) advanced in logic, mathematics and language, but thanks to definitive books like Ray Monk’s “Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius” (Penguin, 1991) and Norman Malcolm’s “Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir” (Oxford University Press, 2001), the man and philosopher is getting…
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The Unfolding Drama of Jewish America
Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience By Julius Novick Palgrave Macmillan, 200 pages. $69.95. Upon finishing Julius Novick’s shrewdly insightful, often quite moving survey of Jewish American drama, “Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience” — a far more substantive and tasty dish than gruel —…
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Hitler’s Doctor: Treating History in a Novel Way
1940 By Jay Neugeboren Two Dollar Radio, 274 pages, $15.00. Dr. Eduard Bloch had the dubious distinction of serving as the Hitler family physician when Adolf was a boy (from about 1903 to 1907). As a result, he became the only known Jew whose escape from Europe was enabled by Hitler himself. Author Jay Neugeboren…
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February 20, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward Reports from Turkey indicate that Jews are suffering pogromlike attacks on their communities — not on the part of Muslims, but perpetrated by Christians. This all began a few weeks ago, in the wake of an election for governor in the Janina region of Turkey. The Christians fielded one…
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Wittgenstein’s Words
From “Notebooks 1914–1916,” 2nd edition (University of Chicago Press, 1984): “One of the most difficult of the philosopher’s tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.” (p. 60) “Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.” (p. 75) From “The Blue Book” (Harper & Row, 1965): “For remember that in…
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Murray Perahia: An Eternal Sephardic Jewish Recital
A New York native who relocated to London a couple of decades ago, pianist Murray Perahia is about to launch his latest American recital tour. At 61, Perahia remains a lifelong student with a quest for emotional depth that has expanded steadily over the years. Unlike other pianists who merely record Beethoven, he is preparing…
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