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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Finding the Scapegoat
’Tis the season when Jews engage in penitence, fasting and charity in order to strengthen their respective cases as they plead before the heavenly judge. Attempting to help us in this regard, charities of all flavors jam our mailboxes with urgent, heart-rending snail mail, while synagogues issue friendly reminders to reserve our High Holy Day…
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Yom Kippur Isn’t Always Yom Kippur
‘The age of rampant capitalism is over. If it’s Yom Kippur in America, it’s time for Israel to repent as well.” So, the other day, said high-ranking Israeli Labor Party member Avishai Braverman, a former economics professor who is now chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee. To an American Jewish reader, such a sentence, while…
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October 17, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward “Please Mr. Editor, please put an advertisement in the paper for me. I want to sell my child,” said a woman who carried a 1-year-old boy into the offices of the Forward. One of the writers approached her and inquired as to why she wanted to sell her son….
The Latest
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Books Adam Kirsch: Give Philip Roth Your Prize, You Ignorant Swedes
That’s my summary of this Slate article from literary critic (and recent Disraeli biographer) Adam Kirsch. In the piece, Kirsch takes to task the folks who dole out the Nobel prizes, for their ignorance of American literature, and their anti-Americanism. He also thinks one American writer, in particular, is particularly overdue for a medal. I…
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The Art of War
Two years ago, in the midst of the Second Lebanon War, the popular French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy was sent to Israel by The New York Times Magazine to “ponder, discuss and travel,” as the title of his piece suggested. The result, an essay defending the country’s military action against vociferous critics, was published alongside two…
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Baring Body and Soul, Again, on Broadway
The new Broadway production of “Equus,” which opened officially September 25, revives a 1973 play that was originally seen as an attack on psychiatry. Written by Sir Peter Levin Shaffer, who was born to a Jewish family in Liverpool, England, in 1926, the play reflected an earlier generation’s rejection of Freudianism. The book “The Myth…
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The Trail of the Elusive Etrog
Consider the etrog, the oblong, yellow citrus fruit that plays a central role in the rituals of the weeklong Sukkot festival. Traditionally sold in a protective web of silky flax, it commands a king’s ransom, prompting all manner of jokes about whether this year’s citron would prove to be, metaphorically, a lemon. At the end…
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October 10, 2008
*100 Years Ago in the forward** Tragic economic circumstances struck the First Roumanian-American Congregation on Rivington Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and as a result, the synagogue was forced to begin selling off its Torahs this week in an auction that was open to the public. The scene was intense. Men cried and women…
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If Ben-Yehuda Had Made Time the Way He Remade Hebrew
For those of you interested in the life of the celebrated Hebrew journalist and lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), the most dominant single figure in the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in late 19th- and early 20th-century Palestine, a new book purporting to be about him, “Resurrecting Hebrew” by Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans,…
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Sacred Objects on Display
Jewish Museums of the World By Grace Cohen Grossman Universe Publishing, 416 pages, $50. ‘This wooden crate holds a tremendous soul, the soul of the Jewish people!” — with these words of Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, Grace Cohen Grossman begins the first chapter of her magisterial, visually stunning new volume, a review and overview…
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Healing Hands on a Keyboard
The classical music world is feting pianist Leon Fleisher with a yearlong celebration of his 80th birthday, featuring a much applauded series of concerts across America. The latest performances, at New York City’s Carnegie Hall on October 2, in Boston on October 3 and in Baltimore on October 5, are titled Leon Fleisher & Friends…
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