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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Back to Orthodox Judaism by Way of the Dalai Lama
Spiritual Journey Home: Eastern Mysticism to the Western Wall By Nathan Katz *KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 192 pages, $27.50. * Nathan Katz’s autobiography, “Spiritual Journey Home,” is at once personal and paradigmatic. Coming from a traditional Jewish background, Katz was propelled by the 1960s into an Eastward-bound spiritual quest. Not content with a mere adolescent…
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Philologos Gets Roasted — And Eaten
In a response to my February 20 column on the American Yiddish verb mufn, in which I said, “You won’t, of course, find *mufn *in any Yiddish dictionary,” Solon Beinfeld of Cambridge, Mass., writes: “In Alexander Harkavy’s 1928 edition of his celebrated Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary*, we find ‘mufn (Am.), to move.’ Uriel Weinreich’s 1968 Modern English-Yiddish…
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Part III: Writing in My Father’s Footsteps
My father arrived in Marseilles in late July 1948, as a lace salesman from Belgium. Gloria Kessler, a nurse working at a hospital in Chicago, had decided to give up her career to smuggle herself into Palestine to help. She, too, received falsified documents from Teddy Kollek at the Hotel Fourteen and remembers sailing with…
The Latest
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April 3, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward The world’s most beloved German-language actor, Adolf Sonenthal, has died of an apoplectic fit in Prague at the age of 75. Born in Budapest to a family of Jewish fabric merchants, Sonenthal grew up in that city’s Jewish quarter. Although he received a good education, Sonenthal was drawn to…
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David Roskies on Making the "Language of Jewish Secrets" Young Again
Author and Yiddish scholar David Roskies is out with a memoir that looks at his family’s transmission of Yiddish culture from the Old World of Vilnius to the New World of Montreal and New York. “Yiddishlands” (Wayne State University Press) takes readers on a journey through Eastern Europe, where Roskies’s grandparents owned a printing press…
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Music That Saves?
Birkenau, known as the death camp of Auschwitz, was one of the few camps where music accompanied mass murder. For 54 women who knew how to play instruments, music was a life saver. The Women’s Orchestra of Birkenau was the only such orchestra commissioned by the SS during World War II. The women played for…
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Pale Dreadlock Sabra
When I ask Idan Raichel, leader of the triple-platinum musical phenomenon The Idan Raichel Project, where he sees himself 10 years from now, he doesn’t divulge plans for future world (musical) domination. He doesn’t talk about how it’s entirely possible that by that point, he’ll have reached the level of international renown of a Paul…
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With Schisgal, the Old is New Again
Murray Schisgal was one of the first and most celebrated “black comedy” playwrights of the 1960s and ’70s. He (and other men, largely Jewish and first-generation American) wrote tough, elegant — and, for the day, satirical — comedies about sexual and other struggles in a vibrant, decaying New York. His 1964 play, “Luv,” in which…
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Social Entrepreneurs Lost In Space
In Eli Valley’s latest comic, the world’s best and the brightest Jewish “social entrepreneurs” are sent into space, just as an asteroid heads for Earth. Click on the thumbnail for a larger version. *Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His column, “Comics Rescued From a Burning Synagogue in Bialystok and Hidden in a Salt…
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Selling National Socialism
A series of photographs depicts Hitler practicing before a speech, his hands shooting above his head, and his face working into a fiery froth, packing menace into a small frame. It’s enough simply to see him; hearing him is almost beside the point. Hitler meticulously plotted almost every detail of the Nazi publicity campaign, and…
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The Other Side of Silence: Listening Into the Bible
The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious By Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg Schocken Books, 480 pages, $27.95. Virginia Woolf famously said that George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch” was one of the few English novels “written for grown-up people.” “The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious,” Avivah Zornberg’s new study of the biblical unconscious is, likewise,…
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