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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December 21, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward In response to the storm of protest against Sholem Asch’s play, “God of Vengeance,” both Asch and his mentor, Y.L. Peretz, have sent letters to the Forward. Articles and letters that appeared in the daily newspaper Yidishes Tageblat, arguing that the play is pornographic and depraved, instigated protests. Asch…
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Going Green, McKinney Announces White House Bid
A former member of Congress who has had a famously combative relationship with the Jewish community is jumping into the presidential race. Former Rep. Cynthia McKinney — a former Democrat formerly of Georgia — has announced her intention to run for president with the Green Party. She made her announcement via video: McKinney joins a…
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R.B. Kitaj’s Final Draft
Second Diasporist Manifesto: A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses By R.B. Kitaj Yale University Press, 160 pages, with 41 black-and-white illustrations, $26. Mysticism is what happens when superstition is given a system. But when system and superstition become combined in mystical art — or in writing about such art — the…
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Struggling Yiddish Theater Finds a Home — Onscreen
It was not long ago that the streets of Tel Aviv and New York were packed with the sounds of the Yiddish language and its echo of exile, displacement and fortitude. For Dan Katzir, the Israeli director of the new documentary “Yiddish Theater: A Love Story,” the sounds of this language, and its disappearance, resonate…
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Family Reunion
Light Fell By Evan Fallenberg Soho Press, 229 pages, $22. Three times in the Babylonian Talmud we find the Aramaic expression nafal nehora — “light fell.” This is the light of a powerful physical beauty that behaves almost like matter, seemingly pulled down by gravitational force — a light that may kindle overwhelming desire. Sometimes…
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How I Finally Learned To Stop Worrying and Love (Okay, Like) Christmas
It’s hard to be a Jew on Christmas My friends won’t let me join in any games. And I can’t sing Christmas songs Or decorate a Christmas tree Or leave water out for Rudolph ’cause there’s something wrong with me! I’m a Jew, a lonely Jew, on Christmas. — Kyle Broflovski, “South Park” Like many…
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Picturing the Holy City
Talk about the dustbin of history: In 1989, an American photographer happened upon a garage sale in St. Paul, Minn., and left with a box of the earliest-known photographs of Jerusalem from the 19th century. Taken by Mendel Diness, a Jewish watchmaker in Jerusalem, the photographs are currently on exhibit — along with shots by…
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Seasonal Greetings
In our last installment, we looked at the most common of all Yiddish greetings, shoolem alaykhem, and its inevitable response, alaykhem shoolem. As with virtually all Yiddish greetings, alaykhem shoolem is often, though not inevitably, followed by a challenge in the form of nu, which has a basic meaning of “so” or “well,” as if…
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Would One Name a Teddy Bear ‘Jesus’?
Sometimes things you have wondered idly about for years find their solution unexpectedly in passing. This is what happened to me recently while following the story of the British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who was convicted in Sudan of the crime of letting her pupils call the class teddy bear “Mohammed.” My reflections on the fate…
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Music Yoko Ono’s Lens on the Holocaust
Yoko Ono has decided to donate a pair of eyeglasses to a Liverpool exhibit aimed at raising awareness of the Holocaust, and is also giving £10,000 to aid in the production of the event. According to the Liverpool Echo, several other celebrities, such as Stephen Fry, Ronnie Corbett and Jerry Springer, will be donating glasses…
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December 14, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward This week began with a giant whimper and not a bang, because of a new ruling that legally designates Sunday as a day of rest. And they mean it: Between the ultra-religious Catholicism of Judge O’Gorman and the club of Police Chief Bingham, nary a peep was heard out…
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