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.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,…
The Latest
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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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The Nazi Cowboy: A New Exhibit Explores the Life and Work of Billy Jenkins
The photograph is bizarre and disturbing: A broadly grinning middle-aged man, dressed in full cowboy regalia, strides across a stage. In one hand, he brandishes a wide-brimmed cowboy hat; in the other, he holds aloft a big Nazi swastika topped by an eagle spreading its wings. The man in the picture was known as Billy…
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MC Citizen: Israeli Rapper Subliminal Tours Stateside
Imagine a rap mogul — Eminem, say, or Jay-Z — playing the role of cultural ambassador: praising the work of police officers, telling the youth of the country to be patriotic citizens, smiling at fans from the steps of the White House. Such is the case with Ya’akov Shimoni, aka Subliminal, the Israeli rap sensation…
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Survival Ode: Fred Wander’s Wartime Story
The Seventh Well By Fred Wander Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann W.W. Norton, 192 pages, $23.95. Fritz Rosenblatt was born in 1917 to Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Vienna, and died as Fred Wander in Vienna in 2006; his adopted surname was meant to describe the years in between. He spent his adolescence revisiting the…
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Side by Side: Irish and Jews in American Theater
Last fall, two Broadway shows by Jewish-Irish collaborators, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s “The Glorious Ones” and Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan’s “Young Frankenstein,” opened on Broadway. These ethnic pairings would have no more significance than a Gallagher and Shean sketch were it not for the fact that the two groups have intersected again and…
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