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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City Boy
Leonard Michaels: Collected Stories Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 403 pages, $26. Melrose was the last kosher delicatessen in my Brooklyn neighborhood, Brighton Beach. It closed this past spring. Its window was shuttered, and a sign was hung, informing all that the business had moved to the Long Island suburb of Cedarhurst. After 1989, Brighton Beach,…
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Middle East Abattoir
Director Ami Dayan doesn’t want to start a rumble. Launching a New York production after a (relatively) small-town success in Boulder, Colo., is already enough of a campaign; he has nothing to gain from starting a ruckus, as well. So Dayan’s approach to the current remount of “Masked”— a play about Palestinians, written by Israeli…
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Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend
At a lecture that sculptor Louise Nevelson once gave at Queens College, a meticulous student raised her hand and offered her summary of Nevelson’s work. “Your work is black and it is wood and it is sculpture.” “If that’s what it appears like to you, then you’ve missed the whole thing,” Nevelson replied. The Jewish…
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Master of Reading
Gilad J. Gevaryahu writes to ask my opinion of a grammatical error in Hebrew that he noticed has been spreading in Orthodox religious circles in recent years. It goes back, he points out, to a mistake that was common in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, one that no longer seems mistaken to most people, because it has…
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When Vegetarians Were Rare
Now that “green” has gone mainstream, affecting the cars we drive, the homes we live in and, most especially, the determinedly pure, meatless food we put into our mouths, many Americans have taken to patting themselves on their backs for their eco-consciousness. To put things in healthy perspective, I’d like to suggest that we take…
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August 3, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward There is a great deal of talk these days about Sholem Asch’s new play, “God of Vengeance,” a tragic drama about a brothel owner whose daughter falls in love with one of his prostitutes. Most of this talk is taking place in the non-Jewish press, which is astounded not…
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Books Happy Birthday, Harry
Dutch writer Harry Mulisch turned 80 yesterday. “I have a theory that everybody has an absolute age which he will always have,” he said in an interview. “My absolute age is 17.”
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Music Who Lost Matisyahu?
It looks like the Lubavitchers did. The Hasidic reggae sensation recently told the Miami New Times: My initial ties were through the Lubovitch sect… I went to a Hasidic school for two years in Brooklyn. At this point, I don´t necessarily identify with it any more. I´m really religious, but the more I´m learning about…
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July 27, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward Revolutionary Frume Frumkin was executed on the gallows this week after she was caught in a corridor in the Moscow Opera House with a machine pistol, lying in wait to assassinate a government official who was attending the opera. Frumkin, who had been jailed last year after it was…
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The Times’ Mevaseret Zion Correspondent
Stuart Pilichowski knows how to make his voice heard. Since moving to Israel in 1999, the 52-year-old garment company agent from Fairlawn, N.J., has been busy writing letters home – often addressed to newspapers. Whether he’s responding to critiques of Israeli counterterrorism tactics in New York’s Village Voice or an article in a vegetarian publication…
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Hebrew vs. Jewish
Bert Horwitz from Asheville, N.C., writes: “Recently, while listening to Prokofiev’s ‘Overture on Hebrew Themes,’ which is music with decidedly Yiddish refrains, it struck me that the difference between ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Jewish’ needs illuminating. Can the intellectual de-legitimization of Israel be due to the mistaken notion that, because a Jew is a follower of Judaism,…
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