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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August 10, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward Moroccan Pashas, unhappy with the French occupation of their country, ordered attacks on the European quarters of the Moroccan cities Casablanca and Mazagan. In response, French warships bombarded the Muslim quarters of these cities, inflicting much damage. Muslims decided to take vengeance on their Jewish neighbors, attacking the Jewish…
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Music Hitler’s Secret Record Collection: Did the Fuhrer Dig Jewish Musicians?
Say what you will about Hitler, he apparently had better taste in music than previously assumed. ABC News reports: “A new chapter about Hitler’s taste in classical music has now been opened on reports that suggest the German dictator and Holocaust mastermind may have actually had an ear for the works of Jewish and Russian…
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The Oracle of Prague
Just a few hours before I visited Lenka Reinerova in her Prague apartment, the Czech writer had gone through experimental radiation therapy for a cancer she has been battling since the 1940s. Reinerova lives alone, her only daughter hundreds of miles away in London, and I could imagine her feebly propping up her tiny 93-year-old…
The Latest
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Dennis Ross’s Diplomacy 101
Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World By Dennis Ross Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages, $26. When the diplomatic history of the Bush administration is written, it will likely be little more than a catalog of lost opportunities, punctuated only occasionally by a muted victory won only after a series of…
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The Masculine Mystique
In Roy Rub’s new work, “Promise Lands,” the artist and typographer uses old advertisements to engage with the process of leaving one promised land (Israel) for another (New York). In “Promise Lands,” Rub compares the American cowboy, particularly the Marlboro man, with the Israeli pilot. Both are “cool,” iconic has-beens. “My Son the Pilot” is…
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Writing About Other Writers
Last week, Joshua Cohen began his review of Leonard Michaels’s “Collected Stories” by praising Michaels’s first collection, “Going Places.” This week, he concludes with a look at Michaels’s second collection, and “The Nachman Stories.” If you missed the first part, click here. Leonard Michaels: The Collected Stories Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pages, $26. Leonard…
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The Truth About Einstein’s Boat
Marjorie Wolfe read the same article in The New York Times that I did. The article, captioned “At relativity, a genius; as a sailor, not so much: Recalling Einstein’s summer of 1939,” was based on an interview with Long Island resident David Rothman, whose father owned a general store in Cutchogue Harbor that Albert Einstein…
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Carrot and Shtick
For many years of my life, I worried about American poetry and German philosophy. Now that I have kids, I worry about more pressing things. Like religion. Like ethnicity. Like cartoons. Since it’s August, and everyone is on vacation, my editor is feeling more permissive than usual. It seems like a good time to pose…
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Sands of Time: The Oregon Coast
An Ocean View: Vacations at the Oregon Coast, an exhibit running until September 23 at the Oregon Jewish Museum, transports the viewer to the sun-streaked Oregon shores, where American and Jewish cultures have long converged. Inspired by the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s 2005 installment, “The Other Promised Land: Vacationing, Identity, and the Jewish-American Dream,” the…
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Book Center Turns New Page
Twenty-seven years ago, the oft-repeated story goes, a scruffy college student named Aaron Lansky launched a mission to save Yiddish books. Unable to bear the thought of thousands of books being thrown away by an aging generation of Jewish immigrants and their Yiddish-illiterate offspring, Lansky founded the not-for-profit National Yiddish Book Center to complete the…
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Hands-On Workshops Spice Up Classes
Every year, nursery school students at the Hebrew Academy of Morris County, a community day school in Randolph, N.J., put down their pencils and crayons and spend a few hours learning about Judaism in a more unusual way. Sometimes, they dive into bowls of flour and water and make homemade matzo, and other times they…
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