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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Books
And the Emmy Goes to… Mr. Warmth
Legendary insult comedian Don Rickles took home an Emmy tonight for “Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program” for the documentary “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project,” which is, of course, about him. “It’s a mistake,” Rickles said. “I’ve been in the business 55 years and the biggest award I got was an…
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Pow! Take That, Old Superhero Clichés!
JEWS AND AMERICAN COMICS Edited by Paul Buhle New Press, 2008 A review in comic strip form by Eli Valley. Click on the thumbnail below for a larger version: Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His comics, which are frequently published in Jewcy, can be seen at his Web site at www.evcomics.com.
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Answers in the Seekers’ Language
For the Love of God and People: A Philosophy of Jewish Law By Elliot Dorff Jewish Publication Society, 296 pages, $35. Why care about Jewish observance? Growing up some years back in the world of Conservative Judaism, I rarely heard an answer to the question. The few explanations that were provided usually presupposed a belief…
The Latest
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Disraeli, Please Come Home
Benjamin Disraeli By Adam Kirsch Schocken/Nextbook, 288 pages, $21. Queen Victoria once asked Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British prime minister, about his “real” religion. “You were born a Jew and you forsook your great people,” she said. “Now you are a member of the Church of England, but no one believes that you are a…
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A Wife, Down and Out in Berlin
This Must Be the Place By Anna Winger Riverhead Books, 303 pages, $24.95. Days after moving to Berlin from Brooklyn this summer, I fell into a deep funk. It was the kind of can’t-get-out-of-bed depression where at 5 p.m. you realize that you haven’t left the apartment all day — except once, and that was…
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The Christian Soldiers of the Holy City
Knights of Jerusalem: The Crusading Order of Hospitallers, 1100-1565 By David Nicolle Osprey Publishing, 224 pages, $25.95. They began as a charitable organization, a brotherhood charged with caring for Jerusalem’s indigent pilgrims before the First Crusade. They ended the Crusades as warlords, infamous for their violence and greed. This role reversal would seem to be…
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Art That Is at Once Lush and Spare
As a graphic artist, Mark Podwal has long been taken with ritual and mysticism, mythology and superstition, angels and magic — particularly as these implicate and influence Jewish tradition via midrash and Kabbalah. Jewish folk beliefs are central to his work. But to Podwal, folk traditions are a vehicle in a larger enterprise: nothing less…
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A Step-by-Step Guide to Peace in Israel
The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last By Bernard Avishai Harcourt, 304 pages, $26. The old adage notwithstanding, everyone judges a book by its cover. When the cover features a subtitle that promises to tell us how lasting peace can be achieved for Israel, the skeptical reader…
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Versatile Dutch Author Fills an Important Gap
As a young Dutch Jew growing up as part of an Orthodox Jewish family in southern Holland in the 1960s, Leon de Winter turned to Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer to understand post-Holocaust Europe. Kafka’s feeling of “seasickness on dry land,” combined with Singer’s “Every human being, even if he is an idiot, is…
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Don’t Worry About a Maverick in This Campaign
Although I try to keep this a Jewish-language column, sometimes a question is asked of me that offers a pretext for sneaking in an outside issue. Such is a letter I recently received from David H. Margulies of Bethesda, Md. Mr. Margulies writes: “Contemporary political rhetoric has driven me to explore the origin and meaning…
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September 26, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward In the wake of New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham’s accusation that Jews commit the majority of crime in the city, the Forward received a letter from an actual thief who is currently imprisoned in “The Tombs.” The imprisoned man’s friends brought him copies of the Forward, and…
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