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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Gadding About
Thirty-eight-year-old French-Moroccan Jewish comedian Gad Elmaleh is well on his way to global stardom. His latest film, “Coco,” which opened in Paris last March, is a huge box office hit, and Elmaleh earns kudos not only as an actor, but as writer and director, too. He stars as the title character, a nouveau riche North…
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Darkness Thickens As My Head Changes
If this week’s column strikes some of you as rather technical, you can blame Cantor David Nemtzov of Willowdale, Ontario, for a question he asked about my column of the May 8 issue, in which I pointed out that the Hebrew word *ta’am, *“taste,” is shortened to *tam *in Yiddish by the elision of its…
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And This Is How We Shall Kill You
Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2) By Grigoris Balakian Translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag Knopf, 509 pages, $35.00. Before we learned to say “never again” came our silence. The unheralded attempt to obliterate the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire ushered in the 20th century: a…
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Holy Scriptures Batman! Bible as Comedy
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible! By Jonathan Goldstein Riverhead Books, 256 pages, $15.00. We all know the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah and his ark, but not quite the way Jonathan Goldstein tells them in “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible!” In his latest book, a collection of stories, Goldstein revisits…
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June 5, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward Bootmaker Yekl Chernobelsk is currently thought to be on the lam in Cleveland after it was discovered that he was married to two women simultaneously. Both wives contacted the Forward — and both sent the exact same photograph, along with a list of their demands. His first wife, with…
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Peter Forgacs: Pariah to the People
An avowed outsider, Hungarian artist Peter Forgacs works with photographs and home movies from the first half of the 20th century, editing them and designing ways to enhance their visual and musical appearance so that he can bring them to life and relevance for the 21st century. He is currently working on Col Tempo, his…
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David Grossman: The Language of Significance
When David Grossman made his way to his place on the stage for the two talks that he gave earlier this month — the first as part of the PEN World Voices Festival at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, and the second, a talk about the Polish writer…
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Ivri Lider: On the Verge
Ivri Lider is an Israeli rock star whose fame is beginning to extend beyond the boundaries of his landsmen and language. Lider, who is openly gay, was catapulted into international consciousness with his 2009 cover of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl.” The video of the that cover has since ricocheted around the world on…
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Looking Backward, Dancing Forward
They slap shoes on the stage with gusto, pirouette around them, share them. They roll balls of yarn, play with them, grow tangled in them. They interact with an onstage singer; they respond to live music that in turn responds to them; they form a counterpoint to the abstract paintings projected behind them. Perhaps most…
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There’s No Place Like Home
For a few weeks this month, a dilapidated old medical clinic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side has been full of life, art and visitors. The structure is still that of a medical clinic; Its current tenants, however, have no medical degrees. And although the option to undress for examination remains open to visitors should they…
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Barren Lusciousness
Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch Translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld W.W. Norton & Company, 320 pages, $29.95. Dahlia Ravikovitch, one of Israel’s major poets, played a formative role in both the poetic culture of the state and the undoing of the male dominance in Israeli poetry and…
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