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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The Lessons of Leo Frank
The sole lynching of a Jew on American soil is a story that many do not know. On April 27, 1913, a young girl, Mary Phagan, was found strangled at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta. Leo Frank, her Jewish supervisor from New York, claimed to be the last to see her alive, and was…
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Shake a Family Tree And a Jew Falls Out
On a Thursday morning, I stop by the restaurant Shoarma Tel Aviv on the way to visit an ancient Jewish cemetery. Friday night, I attend services at an 18th-century synagogue. The restaurant is owned by a Hindustani, and the floor of the synagogue is covered with sand. Where am I? If you guessed Suriname, congratulations…
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Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu
Back at Passover time, I published a column about a facsimile edition of an early 19th-century French Haggadah from Bordeaux, one of whose interesting features was its use of “ngh” to represent the Hebrew letter *ayin. *This was once widespread in the Sephardic communities of Southern Europe, whose Hebrew pronunciation nasalized the pharyngeal glottal stop…
The Latest
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Partisan or Parasite?
Earlier this month, the 90th birthday of folk legend Pete Seeger drew 15,000 people to New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The sold-out show demonstrated the legacy, and continuing vitality, of the American protest-song tradition, a tradition that was born in the Great Depression and gave rise to some of the fiercest critiques of modern…
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The People Revisit Leo Frank
No double murder has altered the nation’s cultural landscape quite like this one. The killings of Mary Phagan and Leo Frank stirred latent antisemitism, racism, sectionalism and bigotry that festered below the Mason-Dixon Line before exploding nationwide, leaving shockwaves still felt today. On April 27, 1913, 13-year-old Phagan, a gentile white girl, was found strangled…
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La Mort Que Je Conviens
Ghérasim Luca was born in 1913 in Bucharest and, as a Jew and intellectuel, spoke Yiddish, Romanian, German and French, the last being the language of his books. A dissolute late adolescence found Luca traveling often through Paris, where he became interested in the movement called Surrealism. He spent the war hiding in Romania, which…
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Sting Like a Bee: Ali of the Typewriter
Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings By A.J. Liebling, edited by Pete Hamill The Library of America, 1,057 pages, $40.00. One of the last pieces A.J. Liebling ever wrote was about an up-and-coming boxer and versifier named Cassius Clay. Liebling wasn’t entirely sold on the egotistical young fighter, but he was clearly struck by…
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Receiving the Original Text Messages
As I sat next to Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz at a recent bar mitzvah reception, our chat turned to the Amazon Kindle. Ehrenkrantz, who is president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, is considering getting one. The Kindle is a slim white device that is about the height and width of a book and has a screen…
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The Rise and Rise of Haredi Thrillers
‘Elazar had the sensation of having left the secure boundaries of the world he knew,” reads an ominous sentence in the middle of Chaim Eliav’s “The Runaway” “and entered a strange new one — a dangerous world.” Like Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart in a Hitchcock thriller, the protagonist has been accidentally wrenched out of…
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Disobedience As An Article of Faith
Conscience: The duty to obey and the duty to disobey By Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Jewish Lights, 160 pages, $19.99. Quoting Yeats’s famous image of a center that cannot hold and the anarchy that is thereby loosed upon the world, Rabbi Harold Schulweis begins the final chapter of his short book “Conscience” by asking, “Who,…
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Words in Flux
The world of American Jewish letters isn’t what it used to be, and it’s changing in fascinating, manifold and, in many cases, encouraging ways. With this Summer Books Special and our online exclusives, we have tried to show examples of some trends in who is reading and who is writing books, and in what form….
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