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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Norman Mailer, Auteur
There is quixotic, and then there is Norman Mailer: the author of numerous best-selling loose, baggy monsters that tackle every important issue and icon of the 20th century, but also a guy who stabbed his second wife (out of six) with a penknife at a party, head-butted Gore Vidal in response to a suggestion that…
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‘Fighting Back’
A new book “Fighting Back? Jewish and Black Boxers in Britain,” and Ghetto Warriors, a related exhibit at the Jewish Museum of London, offer a new look into British minority boxers’ fight for identity and acceptance, both in and outside the ring. Inhabiting London’s East End, a neighborhood that reeked of poverty and despair in…
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Books Samuel Freedman on Michael Chabon’s ‘Love Letter to Exile and Dispossession’
Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon’s latest novel “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” set in an imagined Jewish homeland in Alaska, has drawn critical raves. But it also elicited a widely discussed New York Post item provocatively titled, “NOVELIST’S UGLY VIEW OF JEWS.” Barbs flung by the wildly sensationalistic Post are easy to laugh off, and Chabon…
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July 13, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward A wild scissor fight took place Thursday in Samuel Leichter’s Ridge Street sweatshop. Two people were severely wounded. The fight, which began for unknown reasons, started between two tailors, Isidore Kiviat and Lou Baigel, who attacked each other with large cloth shears. Upon seeing the fight, shop owner Leichter’s…
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Time To Bring the Forward Back Home
If you stand at the lower Manhattan corner of East Broadway and Essex on just about any spring weekend, you’ll see tour guides leading groups around the neighborhood. They follow different routes, but all come to East Broadway at some point. Once the intellectual center of immigrant Jewish life, the street still hosts a number…
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Singer, Sung
Years ago, the director of the Hebrew school where I briefly taught in Portland, Ore., offered to introduce me to a composer she knew at Reed College. For a variety of reasons — most having to do with sloth and misanthropy — I never pursued the connection. I’ve regretted it ever since. The guy my…
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Judging Aharon
Last March, when the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists decided to give its 2007 Pursuit of Justice Award to Aharon Barak, the recently retired chief judge of the Israeli Supreme Court, they chose a surprising colleague to present the honor: Antonin Scalia. The ceremony was held in the august interior of the Supreme…
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A 94-Foot Retelling of Jewish History
Throughout her career, artist Ruth Weisberg has preferred to make art in series, wrestling with subjects and producing multiple works that are thematically, formally and sometimes physically connected. A frequent theme is redemption — especially how a moral or physical danger or horror can transform into a redemptive act for those involved, and for those…
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Portrait of the Artist As a Nice Jewish Boy
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952 By Allen Ginsberg Edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan Da Capo Press, 416 pages, $27.50. Somewhere along the line, Allen Ginsberg changed American poetry — even American culture. Conventional wisdom says it happened the night of October 7, 1955, when Ginsberg performed his…
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In Seventh Heaven
Forward reader Nochum Elek inquires: “I would like to know whether the Yiddish expression in zibnten himl [in seventh heaven] is a translation from the English, or whether it is the other way around and the English ‘seventh heaven’ comes from the one mentioned in the tractate of Hagigah in the Talmud, where it says:…
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Film & TV Daniel Pearl’s Father Laments ‘Moral Equivalence’ of ‘A Mighty Heart’
The father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is criticizing “A Mighty Heart,” the new movie about his son’s abduction, suggesting that it falls into the trap of “moral equivalence.” In an article for The New Republic Online, Judea Pearl writes: You can see traces of this logic in the film’s comparison of…
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