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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The Poet Who Invented Himself
Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet By Nili Scharf Gold Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 424 pages, $35. Even to those who have no Hebrew, the name “Yehuda Amichai” might sound like a line of poetry, and poetry, at its best, should communicate through sound alone. But Yehuda is also Hebrew…
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Songs of a Lost Tribe’s Longing
In the Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, far in the northeast near the Burmese border, some 7,000 people observe the Jewish Sabbath, kosher dietary laws and rules of family purity. Already, 1,400 of these people, known as Bnei Menashe, have immigrated to Israel. The remaining 7,000 wish to join their brethren as soon as…
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Art Spiegelman’s Original Stories, Now Shown in a New Light
Breakdowns: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&!” By Art Spiegelman Pantheon Books, 72 pages, $27.50. When the artist Art Spiegelman published “Breakdowns” in 1978, it came out in a limited edition of about 3,000 copies. As Spiegelman recalls, “There was no demand for a deluxe large-format album that collected the scattered handful…
The Latest
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Is the Dialect of Vilna Yiddish the One We Want To Rely On?
Paul Malevitz writes from Los Angeles: “For well over 70 years now, the standard dialect taught in Yiddish schools has been and still is the ‘northeastern’ one, similar if not always identical to that which was spoken in Vilna. (One difference is that in Vilna Yiddish, veynen can mean both ‘to reside’ and ‘to cry.’…
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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?”…
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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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