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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Visiting Fidel’s Infidels: Ruth Behar’s Return to the Cuban Home She Never Knew
An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba By Ruth Behar, with photographs by Humberto Mayol Rutgers University Press, 288 pages, $29.95. It is hard to begin a book with a section of “blessings for the dead,” but then it is hard to hail from a community that one never really knew much about. In…
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From Frankfurt to New Haven
A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe By Geoffrey Hartman Fordham University Press, 160 pages, $24.95. Memoirs of displacement often trace shadows cast by the world departed onto the world gained. In his new autobiography, literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman outlines in just this way the lasting effects on his life of…
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Glimpsing the World of Holocaust Memoir
What exactly is “personal history”? Is it a cousin of political history, cultural history or revisionist history — an account steeped in perspective before objective truth — or is it just a fancy term for “memoir”? With a spate of memoirs-turned-fiction rattling book stalls, the Holocaust chronicles, published this year, chosen for review this week…
The Latest
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May 30, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The tefillin trade in Warsaw is in an uproar after it was discovered that a set sold in the city was not only lacking the scriptures, which normally sit inside the housing, but also contained a tiny crucifix instead. Initially, this set of tefillin was thought to be one…
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Unterzakhn, Part 12
Read this week’s installment of Leela Corman’s new graphic novel, “Unterzakhn,” which is being serialized in the Forward. (Or, to start at the very beginning, click here). CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW
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Reassembling the Balkan Puzzle
Monastir Without Jews: Recollections of a Jewish Partisan in Macedonia By Jamila Andjela Kolomonos Edited by Robert Bedford Translated by Isaac Nehama and Brian Berman The Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 160 pages, $18.95. In the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, the cityscapes are dotted with evidence of the wanderers, invaders…
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The Ambivalent Reporter
The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe By Paul Reitter The University of Chicago Press, 256 pages, $35. Modern journalism, especially as practiced in America, utilizes what is perhaps the most stifling literary form ever conceived outside of metric poetry. In our daily papers we have reduced our attempts at instantaneous history…
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The Yiddishe Mame of Feminism
Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader Edited by Paula Doress-Worters The Feminist Press of the City University of New York, 328 pages, $18.95. That the great foremothers of feminism, the first wave of the movement, included in their midst an outspoken Polish Jew is not a fact…
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Food and Drink
The main problem with eating all the time is that it can get in the way of talking. Contrary to popular belief, Yiddish-speakers aren’t obsessed with food; they’re obsessed with talking about food, especially what’s wrong with it: it’s the memory of food that attracts them. Much like bores who haunt cocktail parties, telling you…
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Touring America’s Retirement Communities
Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias By Andrew D. Blechman Atlantic Monthly Press, 256 pages, $25. Del Webb’s Sun Cities in the Arizona desert; The Villages north of Orlando, Fla.; a new Catholic-themed town called Ave Maria: Home to nearly 12 million people, these are America’s largest and most popular gated retirement communities, or, as…
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The Joys of Being Taken To Task
Among the thousands of readers who, over the years, have written me with their queries, criticisms, comments and encouragement, there are a small number of regulars who keep returning. Although I have never carried on a personal correspondence with any of them (as much as I might like to, I simply don’t have the time…
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