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 Rabbi’s Son Who Built Detroit
Scroll down for a slideshow featuring Kahn’s work. Albert Kahn is America’s forgotten architect — even though in his lifetime, he (and his firm) produced more buildings than any other architect, and his design and production method changed the face of the country. Eighty years before the bailout of the auto industry, just before the…
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The Wisdom of Solomon
‘The tragedy,” American author Joshua Rubenstein once noted, “is that so many great Soviet Jewish figures have been forgotten and eclipsed. They are remembered only for their deaths.” One could apply such a description to Solomon Mikhoels, the brilliant Russian actor and director. Longtime leader of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (known as Goset), Mikhoels…
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Heard it Through the Grapevine
Rogov’s Guide to Israeli Wines 2009 By Daniel Rogov The Toby Press, 400 pages, $19.95. As far as we know, Thucydides was the first to judge a society by its knowledge or ignorance of the fruit-bearing vine. Classifying a civilization according to its cultivation of grapes and olives, the father of the historiographical essay saw…
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One Who Speaks Does Not Know
The Best American Spiritual Writing 2008 Edited by Philip Zaleski Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $14. Bad spiritual writing is easy. Good spiritual writing is hard. And often for the same reasons. First, to write about spirituality is necessarily to attempt to bridge the gap between private and public. Spiritual experiences, especially as distinct from religious…
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A Waltz With the Unredeemed Past
Like many great stories, the animated documentary “Waltz With Bashir” begins with two men in a bar. It’s a few years ago, and Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman is sitting talking to Boaz, his old pal, now a successful accountant in his 40s. Boaz tells of a recurring nightmare he’s had for 20 years. In the…
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The Hyperbolic Philanthropy of James Simon
James Simon (1851–1932), a Jewish cotton magnate from Berlin, was a museum benefactor of such magnitude that his current obscurity is astounding at best and a scandal at worst. As his biography finally emerges from anonymity, so does one story of the Jewish philanthropy that made Berlin a cultural capital. And Berlin museums are hoping…
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For Ostricher And Poorer
Things are so grim these days, I can’t help wondering whether we might find a measure of comfort in history. It’s not a matter of learning from the past — have we ever? — so much as taking heart from the ways in which the human spirit has managed, over time, to prevail amid crushing…
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To Bug and Be Bugged
Annoyance and botheration are never as well expressed as in Yiddish. Here are a few useful idioms. HAK MEER NISHT KA’ TSHAYnik Don’t knock me a tea kettle [i.e., stop rattling on like a kettle that’s boiling dry]. VOOS DRIKstee MEER A KRIZH FIN DAIM? Why are you pressing me in the small of the…
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A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Doughnut
Hanukkah is over, but not your queries about it. Benzion Ginn writes: “In living through my 84th Hanukkah, I remain stymied by my inability to find an answer to my question concerning the source, origin, derivation, and significance of the word *sufganiyot. *Your skill at rooting out such information would be warmly appreciated.” To tell…
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January 16, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward A brand-new magazine has appeared in New York’s Jewish quarter. Called the Shabbos Journal, it’s brought to you by what is known as the Organization of Shabbos Supporters. The purpose of the magazine is to promote the keeping of Shabbos among the Jews of the Lower East Side. What’s…
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Inner Fire, Outer Ice: The Willful Magic of János Starker
Legend portrays some Hungarian-Jewish musicians as belligerent extroverts, like the late conductors Georg Solti, nicknamed “the screaming skull” by his Chicago Symphony musicians, and George Szell, dubbed “Doctor Cyclops” by his Cleveland Orchestra ensemble. Yet, the mighty cellist János Starker, born in 1924 to a Hungarian-Jewish family in Budapest, has always looked impassive, in total…
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