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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Epic Encyclopedia Turns a Page in Study of Jewish Eastern Europe
What is Jewish Eastern Europe? A geographical space, or a frame of mind? The eternal homeland of Ashkenazic Jewry, or simply its birthplace? A field of academic inquiry, or just a touchstone for nostalgia? For the editors of the comprehensive new YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, capturing di alter heym — the Old…
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A Sad, Searching Soul
The Life of Jews in Poland Before the Holocaust By Ben-Zion Gold University of Nebraska Press, 154 pages, $21.95. Among its many gifts, Ben-Zion Gold’s modest and moving chronicle of a Hasidic boy coming of age in pre-Holocaust Poland affords readers a bracing reprieve from the cynicism generated by a recent plague of phony, self-aggrandizing…
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New Fame for Israel’s ‘National Artist’
At Sotheby’s most recent auction of Israeli and international art, an annual event held in New York each December, Reuven Rubin accounted for six of the top 10 lots, led by “The Big Bouquet,” a large 1963-64 painting of flowers on a windowsill. The work fetched slightly more than its $200,000 to $300,000 estimate. Although…
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Agnon’s Recurring Nightmare
To This Day S.Y. Agnon Translated from the Hebrew, and with an introduction, by Hillel Halkin The Toby Press, 188 pages, $24.95. Reader, I would like to offer a brief and abridged history of Recurrence in the arts. I want to make this survey — progressing from the Romantic rewriting of folklore through Existentialism, to…
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My Authentic Selves
The End of the Jews By Adam Mansbach Spiegel & Graus, 320 pages, $23.95. In his new novel, “The End of the Jews,” Adam Mansbach, author of “Angry White Boy” and “Shackling Water,” uses a rare, time-jumping sort of hipness. He integrates the edgy present of a Jewish boy who finds meaning in hip-hop with…
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Four Questions for Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, the brilliant young sage from the generation following the Second Temple’s destruction, likened himself to “a man of 70” in the Passover Haggadah. If ben Azariah were alive today, his role model for wisdom might very well be Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz. At 70, the indefatigable Steinsaltz — renowned Jerusalem scholar,…
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An Abstract Haggadah
A decade ago, artist Archie Granot sat down to give new texture to one of the world’s oldest books. This year, his Haggadah is finally complete. Granot’s Haggadah is different from all other Haggadot in that it is composed entirely of papercuts — sheets of paper carved with a surgical scalpel and intricately layered. Granot…
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Chasing the Passover Bunny
The Passover Haggadah is jam-packed with symbols of redemption from the Egyptian enslavement. But scholars are divided over the significance of one particularly unusual symbol: rabbit hunts. These images appear mostly in Renaissance Haggadot. Even to laypeople, illustrations of hares — chased by dogs that are often accompanied by men on horseback — are curious…
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Home for the Holidays… Or Not
I sometimes wonder what historians of the 22nd century might make of American Jewry of the 21st, especially when it comes to the ways in which the latter has chosen to mark the festival of Passover. Take, for instance, holiday-related advertisements, a wonderful source of social history. Where once ads for gefilte fish, horseradish and…
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April 18, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward “I am innocent,” Max Soifer screamed as he was led to the gallows by guards at Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison. Chanting psalms as the noose was tightened around his neck, he was executed for the murder of his lover, Annie Margolis. Soifer was convicted of shooting two bullets into Margolis’s…
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Unterzakhn, Part 6
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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