Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Second Home
Although he never actually lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for much of his life, Isaac Bashevis Singer visited almost daily, and the neighborhood became his “second home.” The relationship between writer and geographical muse is the focus of the exhibit Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side, a series of nearly 40 images…
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Passing Before the Divine Eye
In last week’s column on the Yiddish expression bobbe mayseh, we saw how folk etymologies, which explain rare or puzzling words by changing or relating them to words understood by everyone, may come into being when the original meanings of words are forgotten. An interesting example of this phenomenon in Jewish tradition involves the Rosh…
The Latest
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Yid Vid: Happy New Year!
Why he shares a garage with a Hasid, I cannot say.
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Yid Vid: Chicago’s Black Israelites
Here’s an incredibly interesting look at Rabbi Capers Funnye and Chicago’s Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. Hat tip: Arieh Lebowitz
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September 7, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Two Jews were killed and more than 40 were wounded in a pogrom that took place in Brooklyn, where Jews are comparing events to what happens regularly in tsarist Russia. The attacks took place on a block in Brownsville, where there is a two-week-old strike in place at the…
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Film & TV Leni Online
Back in May, our Gabriel Sanders interviewed Leni Riefenstahl biographer Steven Bach at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. The interview has since been broadcast on C-Span and is now available online. The broadcast includes a short excerpt from the filmmaker’s 1938 documentary “Olympia” and — at the tail end — a question from Gabriel’s…
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Pissarro’s Unquiet Pastoral
This fall, the Jewish Museum of New York is mounting its first show dedicated to Camille Pissarro, who founded the Impressionist movement and is its only Jewish artist. The museum’s previous showcases of his work, in 1995 and 1997, were significant events — the former an international retrospective said to be the first major exhibition…
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Parsing the Messy Terrain of the Heart
Through his myriad publications in journals and magazines, one nonfiction best-seller and three books of fiction, Steve Almond has created a distinctive voice and literary persona. Pleasure-obsessed, self-deprecating, horny, hilarious and always dedicated to parsing the messy terrain of the human heart, his projects have always felt intensely — and refreshingly — personal. In his…
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Trembling Toward Icon Status
During the upcoming 10 days reserved on the Jewish calendar for reflection, Amos Lassen, an observant Jew living in the heart of the Bible Belt, will host an event at his Little Rock, Ark., synagogue that might inject a little shock into the Days of Awe. Lassen will be giving the Arkansas capital its first…
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Sweet Home Lithuania
Some bands spend months, even years, practicing before their members perform together — let alone record an album. Not so with The Lithuanian Empire, an eight-piece klezmer-fusion outfit that spent no more than a month practicing before recording its first, self-titled album. Although the band’s geographically diverse membership has resulted in a frustrating scarcity of…
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West Side Storied
Exactly half a century ago, lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II went to Washington, D.C., to attend the staging of a new musical that was slated to open in New York. He knew that nothing remotely like this production had ever reached Broadway. Until September 1957, its stages had not normally presented teenage hoodlums embroiled…
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