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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Muffled Singer
Singer By Ira Sher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 336 pages, $25.00. If the charge of fiction is to tell a story that reveals the mysteries of human behavior, Ira Sher is writing for all the right reasons. His second novel, “Singer,” is a book damp with the sadness and confusion of middle-aged men waking up to…
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Writer in Time
There is still hope for the novel. In a climate increasingly hostile to fiction that does not adhere to the conservative parameters set by the publishing industry, some writers continue to work according to their own lights. Gabriel Josipovici is remarkable for producing novels that belong to the modern European tradition of Kafka and Proust,…
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Tevye’s Many Daughters and Other Comparisons
Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son By Sholom Aleichem, translated from the Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin Penguin Classics, 416 pages, $16.00. Finding out exactly how many daughters Tevye actually has might be a tricky business, but no more so than settling the issue of how many translations into English of “Tevye der Milhiker”…
The Latest
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Apples and Fresh Lemon
“For centuries it survived. It survived without composers, even without printed parts or institutions. It survived because it was important and was transmitted from one generation to another,” Jordi Savall said after he and his ensemble had just proved the point by playing an ancient Sephardic lullaby in a series of guises: Moroccan, Greek, Turkish…
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March 13, 2009
100 Years Ago In The Forward With a small boy of about 4, who had gleaming black eyes, a woman by the name of Sarah Markowitz came into the office of the Forward to explain her predicament. She and her husband live on Allen Street in a stoop-level, two-room apartment with their children. Her husband…
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A Test of Faith
During a recent interview with the Forward, the Jerusalem-born director and activist Avigail Sperber described her new film, “Halakeh,” as a “small story… through which one can understand the place of a woman in Jewish religious culture.” Starring the Israeli actors Ohad Knoller and Hani Furstenberg, “Halakeh” documents the emotional journey of a young observant…
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They Know One
The audience clapped and cheered as the curtain parted to reveal 15 dancers in black suits standing in a semicircle in front of wooden folding chairs. The dancers were performing Ohad Naharin’s “Ehad Mi Yodea” — based on the song “Who Knows One” in the Passover Haggadah — as the closing number of a recent…
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The Evil of Two Loessers?
“Alright already, I’m just a nogoodnik. Alright already, it’s true, so nu? So sue me, sue me, What can you do me? I love you.” –From the Frank Loesser musical “Guys and Dolls” These immortal lines, sung by gambler Nathan Detroit to his long-suffering girlfriend Adelaide, remind us — just in time for a major…
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Yid Vid: Pinsky, a Piano, and a Cheesy Plea
Some of you may know Robert Pinsky as one of the most successful Poet Laureates of the United States; some of you may know him as a ceaseless champion of poets and poetry (not least as the poetry editor at Slate); some of you may know him as a considerable poet in his own right….
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Shoot ’Em Ups Come of Age
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in two words: virtual victory. Virtual victory at all costs — despite all terror: The Churchillian imperative is in full force throughout “Call of Duty: World at War,” but playing, in addition to being just plain fun, is also an incredibly visceral experience, especially for Jewish…
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Fiery Pulpits On the Home Front
Jewish Preaching in Times of War, 1800-2001 By Marc Saperstein Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 640 pages, $69.95. In his semiautobiographical masterwork, “Mercy of a Rude Stream,” the late novelist Henry Roth recalled his Uncle Louie’s little kitchen-table “sermon” that, mainly to his mortified mother, justified his decision to join the American army in the…
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