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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Alone With a Secret
An Israeli military plane lands in a bleak African field. Huddled masses of Ethiopian Jews furtively board the plane before it takes off again. The camera shifts to the face of one terrified boy. A haunting soprano melody provides the soundtrack. From these early moments in “Live and Become,” a film by Romanian director Radu…
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Brownsville Boy
Alfred Kazin: A Biography By Richard M. Cook Yale University Press, 464 pages, $35. Of Alfred Kazin’s serried and august friends and enemies, people still know a lot: Irving Howe and Richard Hofstadter, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt — they all wrote grand books that will long outlive them, or…
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Nu!
Among the best-known words in the language, nu is sometimes heard in English these days, but rarely among non-Jews and never with the vast range of meaning that it can have in Yiddish. Things have changed considerably since 1958 or ’59 when I went tearing out of the room where I’d been watching “December Bride”…
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Defending Jacob Riis
Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York By Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom The New Press, 288 pages, $35. As incredible as this might seem to some, the generation born in the 1980s has no knowledge of a dangerous New York City. Criminals, the crack epidemic and the streetscapes of starving…
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No More Etrogs
‘No More Etrogs” was the title of a February 7 column by well-known political commentator Ari Shavit in the Israeli daily paper Ha’aretz. In his column, Shavit criticized the Winograd Commission’s report on the 2006 war in Lebanon for dealing too leniently with the government, and wrote, “The etrog syndrome has become a threat to…
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February 22, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The current economic crisis has been wreaking havoc on everyone and has hit schoolchildren especially hard. It is well known that many of them are not bringing lunch to school, because their parents can no longer afford it. Lorber’s restaurant on Grand Street in Manhattan is one of the…
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February 15, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Jacob Lustig, a skinny Russian Jew who operates a small fish store, was robbed of $1,026 in a very unusual way. Apparently, a landsman came to him and told him he had $100 and wanted to do some business. Lustig told him that if he gave him the $100,…
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History Books: One Dealer’s Extraordinary Collection of Judaica
Walking amid the medieval suits of armor, vintage Cartier jewelry, and luxurious European and American furnishings at the 54th Winter Antiques Show in New York last month, visitors could easily spot Bauman Rare Books, the only exhibitor specializing in antiquarian and modern collectible books. In Bauman’s 18th appearance at this prestigious fair, an elegant customized…
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Rage Against the (Sewing) Machine
Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America By Marc Miller Syracuse University Press, 224 pages, $29.95. Yiddish today, like a century ago, is a sharply divided language. On one hand, it is still the language spoken in countless ultra-Orthodox homes in Brooklyn, Israel and Europe, and on the…
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Remembering Bobby Fischer
Unquestionably the most famous chess player in the history of the royal game, Bobby Fischer died last month at the age of 64 — the exact number of squares on the chessboard. His lively games will be remembered for as long as the game is played. “Chess is life,” Fischer used to say. But, alas,…
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Tracking Kasztner’s Train
Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust By Anna Porter Walker & Company, 464 pages, $27.95. Why are thousands of non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust memorialized in Yad Vashem, while the one Jew who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews is virtually forgotten? This is the moral injustice that…
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