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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September 12, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Last week, some of the greatest Yiddish writers and cultural figures gathered in Tshernovitz, Bukovina, for the first-ever Yiddish language conference. To be honest, it didn’t seem like something that would ever come to fruition. In fact, the American Yiddish press was mostly indifferent to the conference and essentially…
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The Bittersweet Legacy of a Rich Man’s Looted Art
Reclaimed: Paintings From the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker By Peter C. Sutton Yale University Press, 224 pages, $60. Despite its encouraging title, there are two Holocaust tragedies in “Reclaimed: Paintings From the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker,” an often-stunning book about the recovery of artworks looted from a Dutch dealer. One is obvious: the loss of…
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Scholar Probes the Way (and Not the Why) of Judaism
Jonathan Sarna, the Brandeis University scholar known best as a historian of American Jewry, departs from his usual field in his book “A Time to Every Purpose: Letters to a Young Jew,” set for release this month as part of Basic Books’ Art of Mentoring series. Rather than explore the popular question “Why be Jewish?”…
The Latest
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Cleveland’s Multiethnic Eden
The greening of America has assumed all sorts of forms of late, from heightened attentiveness to the kinds of foods we put on our table and the cars we drive to reusing sheets and towels while on vacation, a gesture in the direction of “conserving our country’s natural resources,” or so guests at Hilton Hotels…
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Documentarian Climbs Her Family Tree
After surviving the German occupation of Italy during the Second World War by hiding with his parents and brother and sister in the home of non-Jews, Vittorio Volterra immigrated to Israel in 1952, when he was 20 years old, and never looked back. He met his wife in Israel, and his daughter, Hava, was born…
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András Mezei, Poet of the Horrors
András Mezei, a major poet of the Holocaust, died in his native Budapest on May 30. He was 78. As a child, Mezei survived the three-month Soviet siege of Nazi-occupied Budapest in the city’s Jewish ghetto. As a teen, he emigrated to Israel but returned to Hungary after just a year and half. He was…
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Too Dumb To Be a Thief?
Dr. Harold J. White writes: “At the beginning of ‘The Miller’s Tale’ in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” in Vincent Hopper’s interlinear translation, I came across the line ‘A riche gnof that gestes heeld to bord,’ which Hopper renders as ‘A rich scoundrel who took in paying guests.’ Could gnof come from Hebrew/Yiddish ganef, a thief? And…
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September 5, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward A dispatch from Jerusalem indicates that much of the Ottoman-ruled Middle East is thrilled with the new revolution in Constantinople. In Beirut, for example, the city was lit up for three days as the residents partied. But the news was slower to get to Palestine, and the reaction was…
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As Olympics Near Their Close, Life in Beijing Goes On
Looking up at the sky tonight, I could see stars glittering. When I mentioned this to my neighbor, she remarked that the government must be thrilled, because stars are visible above Beijing about as often as the Olympics come to town. I told her that the local Chabad rabbi would probably appreciate the great weather,…
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Beijing’s Bagels Taste Like Brooklyn’s
It’s been two weeks since the Olympics began, and Westerners here are getting rather fed up with noodles, dumplings and rice. Even the bread here can taste strange. For Jews, or anyone who has tasted a freshly baked New York bagel, the rumors of a bagel shop in Beijing circulated around hotel lobbies, tour buses…
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For Author, Memoir Sparks New Conversation
Depending on how you look at it, Masha Gessen’s “Blood Matters” (Harcourt) is either an unusually philosophical memoir of a cancer diagnosis or an unusually personal account of the complex ethical questions surrounding the issue of genetic testing. What do we want to know, and what don’t we want to know, about our own fates?…
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