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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A Strong Voice Quietly Changing the Cantorate
In 1993, as I was preparing to produce a recorded anthology representing 25 years of my synagogue music, I found myself searching for a particular kind of voice — one that was harder to find than you might expect. I was looking for a cantor who could bring an authentic American/Ashkenazic vocal sensibility to the…
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How Did Jews Choose Their Last Names?
Sam Sherman of Voorhees, N.J., writes: “Many Jewish family names are those of cities in Europe, often with a suffix that means ‘a resident of.’ For example: Berlin-er, Frankfurt-er, Minsk-y, Pinsk-y, Slutsk-y, Posnan-ski, Smolensk-y, etc. But surely these families weren’t known by the names of their cities while they were living there: They must have…
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A Bridge, Yes, But to Where?
Approaching Jerusalem by Highway 1 from Tel Aviv, the mast of architect Santiago Calatrava’s Chords Bridge first rears up from atop a distant ridge, a white bolt against the eastern sky. At 387 feet, the central tower, with its 66 cross-strung steel cables, is now the tallest structure in the city, and its completion has…
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The Relative Arts
Albert Einstein elucidated his theories of relativity in detached, specific prose, with no thought for style or flourish. We should be thankful that he never wrote philosophy, produced a novel or wrote a sequence of poems. The laureate of Germany, and later of Princeton, was no painter, either, and no sculptor. And though he relished…
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Picturing Evil
After stumbling across a newspaper article about the Holocaust archives at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, Richard Ehrlich, a California-based surgeon-turned-photographer, decided that he wanted to document them. This quixotic impulse proved as difficult as one might imagine: At the time, the archives were closed to the public. But Ehrlich persisted. After…
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Inspired by Jazz, a Poet Does ‘His Own Thing’
The recent PEN/Oakland National Book Awards were a bit of a change of pace for Steve Dalachinsky. For one thing, the poet’s usual performance venues are smoky Manhattan bars and tiny underground jazz clubs, not academic auditoriums. For another, Dalachinsky is far more accustomed to going to other people’s performances than to his own. In…
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July 18, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The police reserves from the 5th Street Station on Manhattan’s Lower East Side were called out last week to break up a riot, the cause of which was 22-year-old Becky Rabinowitz. Apparently, Rabinowitz refused the entreaties of a number of young men who had approached her as she sat…
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Happy Fourth of July (Muppets-Style)
Oh, those subversive Muppets. For a more earnest take on the significance of this great day in American history, here’s a recent Forward editorial on the topic.
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What We Have Lost: Reading a New Translation of Der Nister’s Yiddish Masterpiece
While giving a lecture in Central Oregon recently about my novel “The World To Come,” whose story incorporates the works of many Yiddish writers, I was asked a remarkable question by someone in the very non-Jewish audience: “What do we lose by not reading Yiddish literature?” The question disturbed me. In its challenge to the…
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Piano Man
Listening to “Her First Dance,” pianist Misha Alperin’s latest recording for the ECM label, I was reminded of an old story about the late jazz trombonist Vic Dickenson. Dickenson was a veteran of the swing era who at some point found himself playing in a band led by Don Ellis, an experimental composer and trumpeter….
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Heinrich Heine’s Excellent Adventure
Travel Pictures By Heinrich Heine Translated from the German by Peter Wortsman Archipelago Books, 375 pages, $17. At the age of 27 and already a failure at the textile business, Heinrich Heine abandoned his law studies, first at Bonn and then at Göttingen, to hike around the Harz Mountains for three weeks. This excursion, like…
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