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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Kettle’s On!
Forward reader Mark Hurvitz writes in an e-mail: “The question of the Yiddish expression hakn a tshaynik [literally, to hit, strike or hack at a teakettle] in the sense of to bother someone came up recently with some friends because Michael Chabon uses a translation of it in his novel ‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.’ Why,…
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Books Obama Digs Roth, But McCain Prefers Wouk
A few weeks ago, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg — who has lately established himself as a key contender for the title of Mr. Jewish Journalist — grilled Barack Obama about Israel and other topics of Jewish interest. Now, he covers some of the same ground with John McCain. Since Obama, in his interview, volunteered that…
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Unterzakhn, Part 14
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
The Latest
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A Stroll Down Memory Lane
The past, it’s been said, is a foreign country whose sensibility and texture all too often elude the contemporary imagination. But for those of us willing to give history a try, there are any number of ways to embrace its pleasures and attend to its cautions. We can read about it, page through photo albums…
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Back in the Saddle: An Author Peers Behind a Famous Horse’s Mane and Finds a Jewish Tale
A few years ago, I traveled to Crazy Horse, S.D., to visit the memorial honoring the great American Indian who helped defeat Custer. It is a massive stone carving of Crazy Horse on his steed — or at least it will be, someday, when it’s finished. Work began in 1948, when Lakota chief Henry Standing…
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A Filmmaker’s ‘Blues’ Prompts Traditionalists To See Red
Nina Paley was not looking for an international controversy. Nevertheless, in April, when the now 40-year-old Jewish cartoonist screened her latest film, “Sita Sings the Blues,” at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, she said that’s precisely what she got. A highly experimental animated work that Paley created on her laptop, “Sita” draws parallels between the…
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Chance Meeting Yields Harmonious Collaboration
As a young man working in his family’s textile business, Gerard Edery once traveled the world looking for raw material that could be assembled into new and attractive shapes. It’s been more than 15 years since Edery left textiles for a career in music, but in some ways, his life hasn’t changed that much. He…
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Donning a Second Skin
When Gitl Braun’s art professor suggested, “Go back to your womb,” Braun took the advice literally. The Hasidic mother of eight sat down in her family’s sukkah, which doubles as her studio, and began studying a photograph of her uterus, taken after her recent hysterectomy. It was Sukkot that week, and the glass-ceilinged space was…
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Journeying to the Other Side
Steve Stern writes a century too late and in the wrong language, and he does so freshly and well. His novels and stories and now a novella, “The North of God” (Melville House), transmute European Yiddish into an American idiom, bridging New World exuberance — or at least that of Stern’s native Memphis, Tenn. —…
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Wigging Out
Ruth Seldin writes from White Plains, N.Y.: “The Hebrew term for a wig, pe’ah nokhrit, strikes me as odd and paradoxical. It is odd because it’s made up of two biblical words, neither of which seems related to a wig: Pe’ah, which refers in the Bible to the hair of the beard or the upper…
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June 6, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Drawing thousands of mourners, Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood hosted its biggest funeral since its inception. It was truly something to see: Leaders of nearly every gang in New York City attended the burial of Max “Kid Twist” Zvibak and his compatriot, Samuel Peytsh, alias Jack Louie or Cyclone Louie. Both…
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