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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Music
Punk Is Dead
First, legendary New York punk palace C.B.G.B. passed into history. Now, the man who made the club a center of the burgeoning punk scene has passed away: Hilly (Hillel) Kristal, R.I.P.
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Barbarians at the Gate
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story By Diane Ackerman W.W. Norton & Company, 288 pages, $23.95. In 1935, the Warsaw Zoo was an Edenic haven in the urban center. Small deer and peacocks wandered freely along gravel pathways, past lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos, hippos and other creatures enclosed in areas designed to resemble natural habitats….
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Topical Solutions
Lost Between the Edges By Eldon Garnet Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 240 pages, $14.95. Outcast By Shimon Ballas Translated from the Hebrew by Ammiel Alcalay and Oz Shelach City Lights Publishers, 210 pages, $13.95. The moment a newspaper headline is made, writers of ambition break ranks with journalism and come to attention with books, ostensibly products of…
The Latest
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Amazing Grace
Those of us of a certain generation can remember exactly where we were sitting, or standing, or lying, when we read the opening lines of Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice”: “There is a certain place where dumbwaiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother’s mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate…
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‘Friends,’ Tel Aviv-style
The quickest way to summarize Eytan Fox’s new film, “The Bubble,” is to describe it as an Israeli version of “Friends.” But unlike the characters in the American television show, these 20-somethings collide with reality in a dramatic fashion. Also, it’s not exactly a comedy. Noam, Yali and Lulu live and work on Sheinkin Street,…
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As the New Year Approaches, a Doctor Reflects on Body and Soul
As the Days of Awe approach, their themes — introspection, forgiveness and, of course, mortality — have undoubtedly started to swirl in many of our minds. But some of us, according to physician and author Sherwin B. Nuland, may have it a bit easier than others. Nuland says that the obligations of the High Holidays…
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Forverts and I
My relationship with the Forverts started in adolescence, when I first heard of it from one of my teachers at the Yidishe Schule in Mexico. He was a refugee from the war and an old-fashioned intellectual with a Sisyphus complex: His fanciful, lifelong mission was to introduce Mexican Jewish youngsters to Yiddish. In class, we…
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One Tale, Many Ways To Tell It
“A Historical Chronicle: The Life of the European Jew in the 20th Century,” an exhibit that runs until September 18 at the Krasdale Gallery in White Plains, N.Y., depicts the rocky journey of Eastern European Jews from the shtetl to the concentration camps to modern-day Israel. The show consists of drawings, collages, photography and sketches,…
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Picking @ Shtrudel
In his August 19 column, The New York Times’s venerable language commentator William Safire cites a few examples, taken from a Web site, of words used in different languages to denote the e-mail sign @ that is known in English as “at.” In Czech, writes Mr. Safire, @ is zavinac, meaning “a herring wrapped around…
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From Freeing Tibet to Rebooting Judaism
Erin Potts got her start in activism at a very young age — and on a very big stage. When Potts was only 21, she co-founded the Milarepa Fund with Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. The fund used music to raise awareness about the plight of Chinese-occupied Tibet, organizing a series of star-studded Tibetan…
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Music Northern State’s Rap Against J.A.P.
Young Jeezy may prefer Cristal and Northern State may “enjoy a lemonade spritzer with Eliot Spitzer,” but outside of alcohol choices, stereotypes concerning hip-hop stars and J.A.P.’s are surprisingly similar. That theme is one that concerns Northern State, a trio of female rappers from Long Island (two of whom are Jewish). Instead of dwelling on…
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