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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July 18, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The police reserves from the 5th Street Station on Manhattan’s Lower East Side were called out last week to break up a riot, the cause of which was 22-year-old Becky Rabinowitz. Apparently, Rabinowitz refused the entreaties of a number of young men who had approached her as she sat…
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Happy Fourth of July (Muppets-Style)
Oh, those subversive Muppets. For a more earnest take on the significance of this great day in American history, here’s a recent Forward editorial on the topic.
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What We Have Lost: Reading a New Translation of Der Nister’s Yiddish Masterpiece
While giving a lecture in Central Oregon recently about my novel “The World To Come,” whose story incorporates the works of many Yiddish writers, I was asked a remarkable question by someone in the very non-Jewish audience: “What do we lose by not reading Yiddish literature?” The question disturbed me. In its challenge to the…
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Piano Man
Listening to “Her First Dance,” pianist Misha Alperin’s latest recording for the ECM label, I was reminded of an old story about the late jazz trombonist Vic Dickenson. Dickenson was a veteran of the swing era who at some point found himself playing in a band led by Don Ellis, an experimental composer and trumpeter….
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Heinrich Heine’s Excellent Adventure
Travel Pictures By Heinrich Heine Translated from the German by Peter Wortsman Archipelago Books, 375 pages, $17. At the age of 27 and already a failure at the textile business, Heinrich Heine abandoned his law studies, first at Bonn and then at Göttingen, to hike around the Harz Mountains for three weeks. This excursion, like…
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Imperfect Idyll: Remembering A Vacation That Made History
Many of us tend to think of our vacation as an inalienable right, up there with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But history suggests otherwise, making it abundantly clear that the vacation is a social institution much like any other, subject to bias and prejudice, nastiness and ill will. The site of unfettered…
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Trader Joe’s Treasure
About a year and a half ago, Portland, Ore.-based artist Harrell Fletcher went to his local Trader Joe’s to do some shopping. By the time he went home, it was with far more than a few bags of groceries. Sitting in front of the market and surrounded by some of his drawings was Michael Patterson-Carver,…
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More Than 50 Years Later, Still a Classic
In celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state, ErgoMedia has released on DVD what could be called the first classic of Israeli cinema: “Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer.” At the time of the film’s original release, in 1955, The New York Times called it “an uncommonly forthright and absorbing tribute to largely unsung valor.”…
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July 11, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Cantor A.A. Rosenbloom of Minneapolis is on the outs with his congregation on account of the fact that he got caught going to a hayzl, or a brothel. Not only did he go to a hayzl, but he also got drunk and got into a fistfight with the pimp….
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The Origins of Ashkenaz
Sol Schindler of Bethesda, Md., writes: “Paul Kriwaczek tells us in his book ‘In Search of Zarathustra: Across Iran and Central Asia To Find the World’s First Prophet’ that the Hebrew word ashkenazi originally meant a Scythian. I myself always thought it meant a German. Did ancient Hebrew speakers use one term to describe all…
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Sacred Fusion: Jewish and Muslim Melodies Mingle Easily at Moroccan Music Festival
Earlier in the life of this historic city, it wouldn’t have been odd to hear a Sephardic Jewish melody and the Muslim call to prayer ring out and interweave simultaneously. Fes, widely considered Morocco’s spiritual and intellectual capital, was once home to Maimonides himself. One still can walk through the Mellah, or Jewish section, of…
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