Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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January 18, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward This week brings sad and tragic news to the Jewish people. Wherever Jewish children sing, wherever a folksong is heard and wherever anyone is interested in Yiddish theater, this news will bring forth a sigh and a tear. Abraham Goldfaden, the beloved writer and father of Yiddish theater, passed…
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Film & TV Woody Allen’s New York, RIP
For the past half-decade, New York City has been consumed by a frenzy of greed. A whirlwind of out-of-context development, anarchic “architecture” and a virus-like proliferation of chain stores that has ravaged the cityscape. Property owners, not satisfied with rents and property values that have already soared into the stratosphere, instead are all too often…
The Latest
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January 11, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward A police riot occurred this week as rent strikes threatened to turn from simple protests into an open revolt against the city’s thieving landlords. The bloodthirsty police, who have sided with the landlords, attacked a strip of New York City tenement buildings on 11th Street between avenues C and…
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Yid Vid: Boogying With Bush in Jerusalem
The kids seem pretty focused on their dance routine — if only these two heads of state would stop getting in the way. It always seems like an odd juxtaposition when Shimon Peres meets pop music. Hat tip: Ami Eden (who links to some funny commentary from Keith Olbermann).
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A.M. Klein: Portrait of the Poet as Person
In a 1943 letter to his colleague A.J.M. Smith, Montreal poet A.M. Klein complained of critics’ tendency to identify him primarily as a Jewish poet. “Why did they… have to go flaunting my circumcision?” he asked. “It’s an adolescent trick — this whimsical opening of another man’s fly.” Despite his protestations, Klein is still largely…
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The Parody’s Over: Whither Our Era’s Mickey Katz or Allan Sherman?
In the 11 months since it was released on YouTube, Leah Kauffman’s parody of Justin Timberlake, “My Box in a Box,” has been viewed more than 4 million times. Her “I’ve Got a Crush…on Obama” — out since June 2007 — has been hit close to 5 million times. Like Kauffman, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert,…
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A Tale of Three Cities: Sephardic Music From New York, Amsterdam and London
When my wife and I briefly moved to Portland, Ore., a decade ago, one of the first things we did was shop around for a synagogue. Despite our Ashkenazic roots, we eventually settled on Ahavath Achim, a Sephardic congregation that offered a perfect trifecta of friendly people, good food and beautiful music. The melodies used…
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Israel’s ‘Golden Boy’: A New Biography Explores How It Is We Came To Forget Yigal Allon
Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography By Anita Shapira Translated by Evelyn Abel University of Pennsylvania Press, 392 pages, $49.95. At the end of the Israeli War of Independence, no military leader was better known than Yigal Allon. A former commander of the elite Palmach unit, Allon, a broad-shouldered sabra, coordinated the battles for the…
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A Dictionary of Criminous Thought: Roberto Bolaño’s Compendium of Nazi Collaborationist Writing
Nazi Literature in the Americas By Roberto Bolaño Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews New Directions, 280 pages, $23.95. Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was a Trotskyite, drug addict, vagabond and expatriate. He wanted to be what capitalism might call “an experimental poet,” but instead became Chile’s greatest novelist. Bolaño seems to have summarized his own…
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Photographing Icarus
For 200 cigarettes and a kilo of coffee, David Rubinger bought his first Leica camera. It was Germany, 1946. Rubinger, a young Viennese refugee serving in England’s Jewish Brigade, got to work immediately, photographing postwar devastation. These were the first shots in a long career of documentary photography. It was a career whose philosophy was…
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A Tale of Modesty and Bravery
For a change, this is not going to be a column about language. It’s going to be about modesty and bravery. Two weeks ago, you’ll recall, I wrote about the Yiddish word gikh, “fast,” after receiving a letter from a correspondent signed “Brodetzky” who mentioned, in two tantalizingly brief sentences, having given some uncomprehending German…
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