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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Director Focuses on the Legacy of Muslim Slavery
‘The Film Class” could be the most important small film that almost nobody will ever see. Set in the Bedouin town of Rahat in the Israeli Negev, the film, which was shown earlier this month at the Boston Jewish Film Festival and at The Other Israel Film Festival in New York, follows Israeli filmmaker Uri…
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A Domestic Portrait, With Voices Hushed
Matrimony By Joshua Henkin Pantheon Books, 304 pages, $23.95. Not a great deal actually happens in “Matrimony,” the new novel by Joshua Henkin. Julian Wainwright, a WASP from Manhattan, meets Mia Mendelsohn, a Jewish girl from Montreal, at Graymont College, a fictional liberal-arts school. The narrative follows the couple from their awkward, charming undergraduate romance…
The Latest
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Back to the Lower East Side
After 20 years of renovation, the Eldridge Street Synagogue, a National Historic Landmark, is now open to the public. The Eldridge Street Project’s restoration campaign is set to finish just before a second inauguration this week, capping an $18 million effort that brought together support from the City of New York and more than 18,000…
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A Condi Conundrum
Writing last week in The New York Times, Israel correspondent Steven Erlanger remarked that preparations for the Annapolis, Md., summit have contributed a new verb to the Hebrew language: Le’kandel, “to come and go for meetings that produce few results,” coined from the first name of Condoleezza Rice. I myself have yet to encounter le’kandel…
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November 23, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Not long ago, it was reported in a number of newspapers that conditions for workers in the South were terrible and not entirely dissimilar from the conditions during which slavery was the dominant form of employment. As organizations such as the Jewish Territorialist Organization were sending Jewish immigrants to…
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Yid Vid: A Marxist Take on the Writers’ Strike
Groucho not Karl. Hat tip: Jewschool.
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They’re Building It, but Will They Come?
In a groundbreaking study released last spring, social scientists Steven M. Cohen and Ari Kelman reached a novel and, for some, startling conclusion: Far from being indifferent to Jewish cultural life, young unaffiliated Jews are actually quite interested in attending Jewish events — provided they are being offered outside the walls of Jewish venues. Young…
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Israel’s Jazz Messengers
No one who has bought a Pesek Zman chocolate bar in the East Village or eavesdropped on a Hebrew conversation on the Upper West Side would be surprised to learn that New York City has a healthy Israeli expatriate community. But how many know that Israelis have come to occupy a prominent place on the…
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Saul Bellow on God
This month, Vintage Books published “Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion,” by cultural critic Antonio Monda. In it, Monda offers a collection of dialogues between himself and a host of boldface names — including Martin Scorsese, Paul Auster, Jane Fonda, Spike Lee and Elie Wiesel. Our favorite, though, is Monda’s 2002 conversation with…
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Leaving an Impression
In the fall of 2006, Michigan-based artist Lynne Avadenka went to the Bavarian town of Schwandorf for a six-week artists’ residency program. Never having been to Germany, she picked up a couple of books she thought might be useful in helping her prepare: a Baedeker guide to southern Germany, some secondhand German-English dictionaries and a…
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Back to Mamre
Seth Cohen of Mamaroneck, N.Y., has an interesting suggestion to make in regard to my column of two weeks ago on oaks and terebinths in the book of Genesis. You may recall that in discussing the correct translation of Genesis 18:1, “And God appeared to him [Abraham] in elonei mamre,” I wondered why the first-century…
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