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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Absence and Presence
Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Shoah By David Weiss Halivni, edited and introduced by Peter Ochs Rowman & Littlefield, 144 pages, $21.95. When John McCain was finally forced to reject publicly Reverend John Hagee’s support, he explicitly condemned some of the Christian leader’s most provocative views. Among them was Hagee’s professed belief that…
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The Reciprocal Antagonist
The Silver Jews — one of the most durable indie bands of the early 1990s — have a problem with their name. When the band’s founder, David Berman, came up with it, he didn’t know what it meant, so he fabricated all sorts of stories to explain it. While Europeans want to talk about the…
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Love Stinks
Love Today By Maxim Biller, translated from the German by Anthea Bell Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $23. Though he’ll never be as famous here as he is in Germany, the following should be said: Maxim Biller is a bad writer. One wonders which is more incompetent, his prose or his soul. Blurb that on…
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From the Depths
In a large oblong room with raised ceilings and a faded brick veneer, Shmuel Levy was picking up the pieces of his scattered songbook. “This is terrible,” he muttered, crawling along the floor, examining more than 100 three-hole-punched sheets that just a moment before had spiraled from his black music binder. “This is a really…
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Sibling Revivalry
Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner’s relationship with her older brother, Carl, had long been contentious, she writes in her new memoir, “Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Although they grew up together in a lively Jewish household in San Antonio during the 1950s and ’60s, the two…
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June 20, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Abraham Fidler ran away from a shtetl near Odessa when he was just 15 years old. After wandering around Europe, he ended up settling in the South of France. This was a fine place for Fidler to set up shop and become a professional beggar. And beg he did….
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Smelling A Rat
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has flown back to Israel from the United States to find himself in the same trouble that a few days in Washington helped take his mind off. One source of it is his old friend Uri Messer, the Israeli lawyer who told the police that he handled the slush funds the…
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Unterzakhn, Part 15
Read this week’s installment of Leela Corman’s new graphic novel, “Unterzakhn,” which is being serialized in the Forward. (Or, to start at the very beginning, click here). CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW
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New Visions: A Once-Blind Artist Presents Two Exhibitions
Among her earliest memories from a childhood in the upstate New York town of Ferndale, 70-year-old artist Rosalyn Engelman recalls watching graphic newsreels that tracked the fate of relatives who ultimately would perish in the Holocaust. For her parents, the vicissitudes of the 20th century were experienced more directly. Her father was stranded in New…
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The Operator: The Double Life of a Military Strategist
There’s one thing Edward Luttwak wanted me to know, before he asked if I had a cell phone, and if so, could I turn it off and remove its battery, presumably if improbably so that he couldn’t be traced. We were sitting in his office library in his family’s sprawling Victorian home in suburban Chevy…
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Tropical Refuge
As early as 1935, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator who led the Dominican Republic from 1930 through 1961, suggested that his country would welcome as many as 100,000 refugees from Europe. It might seem ironic that Trujillo, known for his repressive regime, would invite Jews to the island, promising them religious freedom, but in…
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Music How hundreds of forgotten klezmer tunes have been rescued from oblivion
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