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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Barring Joey Cheek, Hailing China’s ‘Untainted’ Africa Policies
Beijing is all about Yao Ming today. He is on the front page of every Chinese newspaper, shown raising the “sacred” Olympic torch high as he trotted through the Forbidden City’s Duan Gate Wednesday, under the stoic gaze of that other national hero, Mao Zedong. There he is again on television, in all his 7-foot-6-inch…
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Out and About: Israel’s Adam Yekutieli Puts a Fresh Spin on Street Art
There isn’t much about Adam Yekutieli’s street art that is immediately distinguishable as Israeli, and in fact his fanciful and compassionate drawings and phrases go against much of what most would recognize as Israel’s characteristically macho culture. Yekutieli is best known by the street tags “Know Hope” and “Please Believe” — phrases that line the…
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Kosher Chinese: Jewish and Asian Currents Find Harmony in Opera
Presiding over a table stuffed with every imaginable Chinese delicacy, Stewart Wallace appeared very much the Jew at ease: cracking jokes, expertly wielding chopsticks and savoring every bite, his curly hair bobbing about. But this was a Saturday night ritual with a difference: Wallace’s dining companions were mostly Chinese musicians, the main language was Mandarin…
The Latest
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Bad Samaritans
Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution By Ian Kershaw Yale University Press, 400 pages, $35. A recent news item in The New York Times highlighted the matter of collective indifference. Time-lapse pictures from a security camera showed a woman collapse onto the floor of a Brooklyn hospital waiting room. Though there were a number…
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Pulitzer Winner’s ‘Failure’ Less Than Complete Success
In “Failure,” which shares the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry with a volume by Robert Hass, Philip Schultz departs from the measured reminiscences of his celebrated previous collection, “Living in the Past,” for a series of plainspoken elegies on life’s everyday betrayals. The terse and honest tone for which Schultz, an occasional New Yorker contributor,…
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August 15, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Sweatshop romances are not uncommon among the Jews of New York City, but it looked like trouble when 19-year-old Sarah Bennett fell in love with an Italian worker, Jim Troyano, at the paper box factory on the Bowery, where they both worked. Both of them having been in America…
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Lord Have Mercy
Reader Alan Margolis wants to know whether the English name John comes from the biblical name Yohanan — which, he writes, “sounds like Hebrew for ‘God has had mercy.’” Margolis is right on both counts. John does ultimately come from Yohanan, and Yohanan indeed means “God has had mercy” or “God has forgiven.” It’s a…
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Beijingers Wait for Olympics Largesse To Trickle Down
Riding my bike home from dinner on Saturday night, I saw flashing lights fill the night sky over the rooftops in the distance. For once the night was a clear one, devoid of the usual smog. Turning a corner I could see the sparkle of fireworks: the opening ceremony rehearsal. I asked my neighbor, a…
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An Olympic Welcome, From Your Friendly Neighborhood Big Brother
The colorful billboards that hang along the highways, boulevards and parks here declare the Beijing 2008 Olympic slogan, “One World One Dream,” in a number of languages, including Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Russian. Hebrew did not make the cut. Given that the entire population of world Jewry could fit into this city of 17…
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Reel Life: Israeli Artist Maya Zack Makes a Powerful American Debut
It doesn’t much matter whether “Mother Economy,” the 19-minute film that went on view at New York’s Jewish Museum on July 1, is experimental cinema or video art. This modest exhibition, continuously screening in the 300-square-foot Goodkind Media Center through October 23 and marking the American debut of Israeli artist Maya Zack, is a powerfully…
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Revivifying Identity
Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy By Natan Sharansky, with Shira Wolosky Weiss PublicAffairs, 304 pages, $26.95. Everyone knows something terrible is happening. This much seems self-evident. There were the attacks of September 11, 2001, followed by the incomplete overthrow of the Taliban, followed by the invasion of Iraq, set against the backdrop…
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