Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Place and Time: When History Becomes an Asset
Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but so, too, does architecture. I refer here to those buildings that survive the passage of time and the ups and downs of their respective neighborhoods only to be turned into something else: factories into condos, warehouses into restaurants. In this instance, what pleases the eye and tickles the imagination…
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Plucking the Strings of Tragedy
The Savior By Eugene Drucker Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $23. To write a novel about the Holocaust is to enter, willingly, into precarious territory. What at first seems like a rich mine for inspiration is a subject seemingly ever present in contemporary literature of a certain sort, yet ever impossible to label cliché. Authentic…
The Latest
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Neither and Both
l An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry Volume 1: 1801-1953 Volume 2: 1953-2001 Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer M.E. Sharpe, 1,376 pages, $225. The ideal anthology is now, one would think, impossible. Not aiming for the compleat condition as established by the encyclopedia (18th century), biographical dictionary…
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How a Biographer Repaid One of History’s Debts
In 1997, while scanning the books clamoring for attention in the literary editor’s closet at The Jerusalem Post, Haim Chertok, an occasional reviewer for that paper, noted a festshrift — a collection of commemorative essays — marking the centenary of the birth of an Anglican priest, James Parkes. Chertok had read two books that Parkes…
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Auschwitz Unlocked
Seeking the “lingering presence” that exists in empty spaces that once contained human life, 37-year-old photographer Simon Watson recently traveled to Auschwitz, where, after months of correspondence with museum officials, he received authorization to photograph areas that had never been seen by the public. Watson — a New York-based fine arts and Getty Images photographer…
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July 6, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Louis Bernstein, a doctor formerly in the employ of New York’s Beth Israel Hospital, arrived at the editorial offices of the Forward this week, clutching an open letter to the directors of the hospital. In the letter, Bernstein charged that the hospital’s patients were mistreated in such a manner…
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Judeo-English, Part III
In response to my previous two columns on “Judeo-English,” Sarah Bunin Benor, a linguist and assistant professor of Jewish studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, has sent me a paper, not yet published, that she has written on the same subject. In it she concludes (as I did) that such…
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June 29, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward The situation on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side is terrible. The entire population is threatened with illness because of a sanitation workers’ strike. The neighborhood’s sidewalks are piled high with overflowing ash cans, and rotting garbage is sizzling in the summer heat. Making matters worse, the Sanitation…
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How One Artist Found Inspiration in the Margins Of Ancient Hebrew Books
Doodlers, beware. Your scribbles could outlive — and outshine — you. Artist Zeva Oelbaum has found inspiration in the endpapers of 18th- and 19th-century Hebrew books, transforming doodles made by Central and Eastern European students in the bindings of their seforim into richly toned gelatin silver prints. The fragmented images are largely indecipherable, but they…
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What Rorty Wrought
Richard Rorty’s death on June 8, at the age of 75, cut short a unique philosophical career. His influence on the intellectual scene of the final quarter of the 20th century can hardly be exaggerated. Rorty’s name is, indeed, known far and wide. But his influence extended far beyond the circles of those who knew…
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Hunting in Zimbabwe For Identity And Family
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun By Peter Godwin Little, Brown and Company, 352 pages, $24.99. Last August, I visited an elderly Jewish couple at their spacious apartment in an affluent neighborhood in Johannesburg, South Africa. A distant family friend had referred to them as people who would welcome the opportunity to take me out…
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