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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October 24, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Jews on Manhattan’s Lower East Side turned out in the tens of thousands in a huge demonstration to support the socialist candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs. Along with such speakers as Morris Hillquit and Jacob Pankin, Debs’s short speech about the incredible increase in socialism was met with…
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Booths, Tabernacles, Tents and Huts: Naming the Sukkah
The eight-day holiday of Sukkot that began on the evening of Monday, October 13, is known in English — quaintly, to our ears — as the “Feast of Booths” or the “Feast of Tabernacles.” It’s no wonder that we prefer to say (stressing the second syllable) “Sukkot” — or, pronouncing the word in its Eastern…
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What Makes Edgar Run?
Hope, Not Fear: A Path to Jewish Renaissance By Edgar M. Bronfman and Beth Zasloff St. Martin’s Press, 240 pages, $24.95. One has to be in a coal mine in Uzbekistan to be unaware of the Bronfmans, particularly Edgar M. Bronfman and his Jewish communal activities. Top dog at the World Jewish Congress for more…
The Latest
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Sephardi Sea Hawks
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom — and Revenge By Edward Kritzler Doubleday, 336 pages, $26. Yo ho ho and a bottle of Manischewitz! The jokes had better be disposed of immediately, since the very…
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Finding the Scapegoat
’Tis the season when Jews engage in penitence, fasting and charity in order to strengthen their respective cases as they plead before the heavenly judge. Attempting to help us in this regard, charities of all flavors jam our mailboxes with urgent, heart-rending snail mail, while synagogues issue friendly reminders to reserve our High Holy Day…
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Yom Kippur Isn’t Always Yom Kippur
‘The age of rampant capitalism is over. If it’s Yom Kippur in America, it’s time for Israel to repent as well.” So, the other day, said high-ranking Israeli Labor Party member Avishai Braverman, a former economics professor who is now chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee. To an American Jewish reader, such a sentence, while…
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October 17, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward “Please Mr. Editor, please put an advertisement in the paper for me. I want to sell my child,” said a woman who carried a 1-year-old boy into the offices of the Forward. One of the writers approached her and inquired as to why she wanted to sell her son….
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Books Adam Kirsch: Give Philip Roth Your Prize, You Ignorant Swedes
That’s my summary of this Slate article from literary critic (and recent Disraeli biographer) Adam Kirsch. In the piece, Kirsch takes to task the folks who dole out the Nobel prizes, for their ignorance of American literature, and their anti-Americanism. He also thinks one American writer, in particular, is particularly overdue for a medal. I…
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The Art of War
Two years ago, in the midst of the Second Lebanon War, the popular French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy was sent to Israel by The New York Times Magazine to “ponder, discuss and travel,” as the title of his piece suggested. The result, an essay defending the country’s military action against vociferous critics, was published alongside two…
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Baring Body and Soul, Again, on Broadway
The new Broadway production of “Equus,” which opened officially September 25, revives a 1973 play that was originally seen as an attack on psychiatry. Written by Sir Peter Levin Shaffer, who was born to a Jewish family in Liverpool, England, in 1926, the play reflected an earlier generation’s rejection of Freudianism. The book “The Myth…
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The Trail of the Elusive Etrog
Consider the etrog, the oblong, yellow citrus fruit that plays a central role in the rituals of the weeklong Sukkot festival. Traditionally sold in a protective web of silky flax, it commands a king’s ransom, prompting all manner of jokes about whether this year’s citron would prove to be, metaphorically, a lemon. At the end…
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