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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Barbra Streisand’s brand-new duet with Bob Dylan is a whole lot different than you might think
Though Dylan and Streisand's voices may seem ill-suited to each other, the two complement each other gorgeously on 'The Very Thought of You'
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A New Play Lifts Veil on Insular Syrian-Jewish Community
David Adjmi’s newest play terrifies him. It’s provocative and unflinching in its representation of a specific Jewish community as materialistic, close-minded, insular to a fault. Granted, among Adjmi’s other produced works — “The Evildoers,” which packed up a run at Yale Repertory Theatre this past month, and “Elective Affinities,” his meditation following the attacks of…
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A Place Called Ashkenaz
On March 20, Purim will be celebrated in Ashkenaz. This Ashkenaz, however, refers not to the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe but to a performance space in Berkeley, Calif., named Ashkenaz Music & Dance Community Center. This year, the festival of Esther and Mordechai will be celebrated there with a party featuring Shivat…
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A Melody of Jewish Meditation
When I asked composer Daniel David Feinsmith what his former life as a Zen monk had entailed, he had a ready answer. “Well,” he told me by phone from San Francisco, “it involved celibacy. It involved meditation — hours facing a blank wall. And it involved frugality.” Normally, the word “celibacy” would be the showstopper…
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David Yazbek’s Other, Unnoticed Career
David Yazbek, the acclaimed composer and pianist, is no stranger to accolades and notoriety. His work on the Broadway musicals “The Full Monty” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” has earned him two Tony nominations (“Two Time Tony Award Loser!” his Web site proclaims); he’s won an Emmy for his comedy writing on “Late Show With David…
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In the Beginning, There Was Vitebsk
Vitebsk: The Life of Art By Aleksandra Shatskikh, translated by Katherine Foshko Tsan Yale University Press, 408 pages, $55. In the beginning, otherwise known as the year 988, Rus converted to Christianity, Vitebsk was founded and 1,000 years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, which was good. Today a backwater of fascist Belarus, Vitebsk had always…
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If He Had World Enough and Time
A tip for the brainy, leisurewear-oriented hipster: Type George Steiner’s name into Amazon.com’s search engine, and you’ll find, among his books of cultural and literary criticism, a novel about Hitler, a memoir titled “Errata: An Examined Life” and, of especial curiosity, a T-shirt emblazoned with a cherry-red heart that’s framed by the words “I Love…
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What if Hitler Were a Jewish Supremacist?
The Jewish Messiah By Arnon Grunberg, translated by Sam Garrett Penguin Press, 470 pages, $27.95. ‘The biggest mistake fascism made was to turn against the Israelite,” a character says in Arnon Grunberg’s new novel, “The Jewish Messiah.” “If fascism had absorbed the Israelite, if fascism had said to the Israelite: Come, let us join forces,…
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Gershom Scholem’s Life, in His Own Words
Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919 By Gershom Scholem Edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 384 pages, $39.95. In the early 1970s, Vienna-born writer and memoirist Jakov Lind returned to Israel after experiencing a mystical vision “on a very fine day about 3 in…
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A Mother’s Life
Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir By David Rieff Simon and Schuster, 192 pages, $21. David Rieff, the only son of sociologist Philip Rieff and writer Susan Sontag, has written a memoir about his mother’s death, in December 2004, of complications from myelodysplastic syndrome, commonly known as MDS. Sontag, among the most…
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Faced With Death, an Unlikely Heroine Emerges
The Book of Dahlia By Elisa Albert Free Press, 288 pages, $23. It sounds almost like the beginning of a terrible joke: What happens when a 29-year-old who has wasted much of her life gets a brain tumor? Except that instead of a joke, this is the premise of Elisa Albert’s new novel, “The Book…
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Last Names, Lost in Translation
Dennis Fleishman of Toms River, N.J., has a question that, he writes, “has been lingering in my mind for quite some time. What determines the pronunciation in English of the vowel in names ending in ‘-stein’? Sometimes it’s pronounced like the vowel in ‘pie’ and sometimes like the vowel in ‘feet.’ Is there a rule…
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יעקבֿ פֿינקלמאַן באַשרײַבט אויך זײַן לאַנגיאָריקן פֿאַך — ווי ער האָט צוגעשטעלט וויסן אין טעלעקאָמוניקאַציע איבער דער וועלט
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