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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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Greeting and Meeting
Hello. It’s supposed to be simple. An English greeting helps to move two people across the great divide from quiet to conversation, from separation to communication. You say “Hello,” “Good morning,” or “Good evening” and you get “Hello,” “Good morning,” or “Good evening” in return. Each formula is a well-paved pathway, a gentle ramp that…
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The Formalist’s Formalist: On Viktor Shklovsky
Zoo, or Letters Not About Love Translated by Richard Sheldon Dalkey Archive Press, 164 pages, $11.95. A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922 Translated by Richard Sheldon Dalkey Archive Press, 304 pages, $13.95. Third Factory Translated by Richard Sheldon Dalkey Archive Press, 125 pages, $12.95. Knight’s Move Translated by Richard Sheldon Dalkey Archive Press, 184 pages, $13.95….
The Latest
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November 16, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward New York’s Jewish neighborhoods are becoming more and more like the Land of Israel. The only thing missing is a king. This week, steps were taken toward the goal of obtaining one when Police Chief Bingham appointed Isaac Frank as Liberty Street’s Police Captain in the Brownsville section of…
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Lenny Bruce’s Mild-Mannered Heirs
Let’s start this week with a pop culture quiz. Lenny Bruce was: (a) A very funny guy (b) A fearless champion of First Amendment rights (c) God To many of his devotees, the answer is “all of the above.” You have to wonder, though, just how many of those who attended the second annual “Homage…
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Dear Aby
Obsessed by Art — Aby Warburg: His Life and His Legacy By Francesca Cernia Slovin Translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli Xlibris, 227 pages, $22.99. Without a belief that art is decipherable — that an onlooker can, through contemplation of symbols and patterns in a work of art, commune with intellects and sensibilities far…
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Director Shows His ‘Stripes’
His directorial prowess led to the endearing marriage of slapstick comedy and supernatural lunacy known as “Ghostbusters,” but once upon a time, Ivan Reitman was merely a scared little Jewish boy. He was born in Czechoslovakia in 1946, shortly after his parents, Leslie and Clara, barely managed to survive the Holocaust. Their life together in…
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Translating the Language of Love
When Verónica Albin read Forward contributor Ilan Stavans’s “Dictionary Days” (Graywolf Press, 2005), she was stricken by the chapter in which he described looking up the word “love” in standard dictionaries in various languages and finding out, to his surprise, that each culture defines the term in divergent ways. Soon after, she convinced Stavans to…
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Bridging Body and Soul
Bearing the Body By Ehud Havazelet Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $24. The revelation buried within Ehud Havazelet’s first novel, “Bearing the Body,” is welcome and rare: Upon first opening its covers, the thought occurs that this novel, as a body of work, must have been borne of a heavy labor (Havazelet’s last book…
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Retracing Van Gogh’s Footsteps, Camera in Hand
In 2000, six months after the death of her husband, philanthropist Ted Arison, author Lin Arison took her granddaughter on a month-long journey through France, hoping that immersion in art would soothe their grief. While saddened by Van Gogh’s unrequited yearning for an artistic community, Arison was stricken by the intense connections between the other…
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Stating the Obvious
The story is told about Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference that, bored by a discussion about the role of the Vatican in postwar Europe, he asked brusquely, “How many divisions has the pope?” He had a point: The pope had none. And yet, although diplomatic verbal disputes often seem academic, the diplomats continue to…
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November 9, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward A heartbreaking letter written by a boy in Antwerp was brought into the offices of the Forward. Apparently, the boy, an emigrant from Eastern Europe, was left alone in Antwerp. His parents are somewhere in New York, but as of yet they have not been found. In part, the…
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