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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From the Depths
In a large oblong room with raised ceilings and a faded brick veneer, Shmuel Levy was picking up the pieces of his scattered songbook. “This is terrible,” he muttered, crawling along the floor, examining more than 100 three-hole-punched sheets that just a moment before had spiraled from his black music binder. “This is a really…
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Sibling Revivalry
Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner’s relationship with her older brother, Carl, had long been contentious, she writes in her new memoir, “Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Although they grew up together in a lively Jewish household in San Antonio during the 1950s and ’60s, the two…
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June 20, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Abraham Fidler ran away from a shtetl near Odessa when he was just 15 years old. After wandering around Europe, he ended up settling in the South of France. This was a fine place for Fidler to set up shop and become a professional beggar. And beg he did….
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Smelling A Rat
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has flown back to Israel from the United States to find himself in the same trouble that a few days in Washington helped take his mind off. One source of it is his old friend Uri Messer, the Israeli lawyer who told the police that he handled the slush funds the…
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Unterzakhn, Part 15
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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New Visions: A Once-Blind Artist Presents Two Exhibitions
Among her earliest memories from a childhood in the upstate New York town of Ferndale, 70-year-old artist Rosalyn Engelman recalls watching graphic newsreels that tracked the fate of relatives who ultimately would perish in the Holocaust. For her parents, the vicissitudes of the 20th century were experienced more directly. Her father was stranded in New…
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The Operator: The Double Life of a Military Strategist
There’s one thing Edward Luttwak wanted me to know, before he asked if I had a cell phone, and if so, could I turn it off and remove its battery, presumably if improbably so that he couldn’t be traced. We were sitting in his office library in his family’s sprawling Victorian home in suburban Chevy…
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Tropical Refuge
As early as 1935, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator who led the Dominican Republic from 1930 through 1961, suggested that his country would welcome as many as 100,000 refugees from Europe. It might seem ironic that Trujillo, known for his repressive regime, would invite Jews to the island, promising them religious freedom, but in…
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In Brief
Complete Minimal Poems By Aram Saroyan Ugly Duckling Presse, 280 pages, $20. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and so poetry needed to be created, too, to describe those two entities and their interaction. And Aram Saroyan arose and said, “Let there be lighght,” and there was, and Congress saw that…
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Service Without a Smile
Picture the stereotypical Israeli soldier — macho, muscular and, of course, male. But young Israeli women do up to two years of compulsory military service (men do three), some of them spending their time in the simmering West Bank. And as the powerful documentary “To See If I’m Smiling” makes clear, the women who serve…
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June 13, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Don’t ask Louie Moscowitz and Rosie Venitsky to try using a matchmaker again. Getting burned once was apparently enough. Venitsky claims that her bank account is $215 lighter because of a matchmaker by the name of Moyshe Kablitsky. And if it hadn’t been for this matchmaker, Moscowitz wouldn’t be…
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