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 Man With the Yellow Star: The Jewish Life of Serge Gainsbourg
Visitors to Paris may have noticed, in an otherwise ritzy neighborhood in the posh seventh arrondissement, a small building at 5 bis Rue d e Verneuil that is abundantly covered in garish multicolored graffiti. It is the home of the late French singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg (1928–1991), born Lucien Ginsburg in Paris’s humble 20th arrondissement. His…
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A Rip in the Fabric of Mother
All Odd and Splendid By Hilda Raz Wesleyan University Press, 108 pages, $22.95. In the beginning, there is gender. “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl,” we say. That’s our genesis, the bedrock on which we build our selves and our lives. That’s why when the gender of someone we love shifts, our selves, lives…
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Of Giants’ Robes and Dwarvish Thieves
The Clothes on Their Backs By Linda Grant Scribner, 304 pages, $27.50 (hardcover), $14 (trade paperback). Toward the end of Philip Roth’s poignant story “Eli the Fanatic,” Eli, exhausted by his fruitless efforts to get a Hasidic yeshiva to leave his nicely acculturated Jewish neighborhood, decides to adopt a different strategy. He wraps his Brooks…
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Art and Apocrypha: The Fraught Beauty of the Dead Sea Scrolls
They survived, untouched, for nearly two millennia, but the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been, since their discovery in 1947, fraught with controversy. Ownership, religious patrimony, Christian-Jewish relations and the odor of antisemitism emanating from some Christian scholars who controlled access to the scrolls — these have roiled the academic and public-affairs worlds…
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December 5, 2008
100 Years Ago in the Forward An interesting and unusual case is currently before the courts in Warsaw. The editor of the Polish newspaper S.L. Kempner is being sued by a tailor named Yosef Cohen for reporting in the paper that in order to get out of paying rent, Cohen spread a rumor that ghosts…
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Defined by Quality
Concerts and CDs featuring composers who died during the Holocaust have become commonplace, with such once forgotten names as Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944), Pavel Haas (1899–1944) and Gideon Klein (1919–1945) receiving posthumous tributes. Yet these honors, sincere and well deserved as they undoubtedly are, tend to type composers and their music in the somber region of…
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Symphonies Lost and Found
You would have thought that musicians who escaped fascist Germany would feel liberated to compose in freedom. Not so. Restarting a career in a new country at any time is full of pitfalls, and even outside Germany, conservative musical tendencies in the 1930s were equated, rightly or wrongly, with the Nazi rejection of “degenerate” art….
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Being a Profound Critical Analysis of Contemporary Jewish Comedic Literature
Jew-Jitsu: The Hebrew Hands of Fury By Rabbi Daniel Eliezer and Paul Kupperberg Citadel, 112 pages, $12.95. Shtick Shift: Jewish Humor in the 21st Century By Simcha Weinstein Barricade Books, 192 pages, $15.95. How To Profit From the Coming Rapture: Getting Ahead When You’re Left Behind By Steve and Evie Levy, as told to Ellis…
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Manners Maketh the Mensch
Our previous installment looked at how Yiddish will often use the third person as a sign of respect. Day-to-day use of the third person in addressing male strangers is pretty much restricted to der yeed, “the Jew,” which is sometimes used instead of reb yeed, “Mister Jew,” in addressing strangers. IKH MIZ BAITN BEI DAIM…
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California: Made in Germany, by Jews
California has always been different from every other place not only in America, but also in the world. The Golden State’s human landscape has been as spectacularly varied as its natural one, a unique blending of dreamers, strivers, crackpots and hustlers. Perhaps nowhere is this historical divergence more notable than in the history of California’s…
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A Turn of Phrase
David Gruber writes from Win–nipeg, Manitoba: “I have recently encountered a new use of the word ‘trope.’ The first instance was a commentator describing a politician deviating from his party’s platform as ‘not following the party trope.’ The second, in an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail*, was the sentence ‘A Cameron Diaz character…
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