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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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,…
The Latest
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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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Film & TV American Apparel to Woody: We’re Sorry (and We’re Parodists)
American Apparel is apologizing to Woody Allen after he filed a $10 million lawsuit against the trendy T-shirt monger for its unauthorized use of an image of him dressed in Hasidic garb on a pair of billboards. “We deeply admire Woody Allen as a filmmaker and an inspiring social and political satirist,” the company said…
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Happy Ending
The following celiac-friendly dessert recipe is from Susie Fishbein’s new cookbook, “Passover by Design” (ArtScroll Shaar Press). Lemon Meringues pareve, non-gebroktsmakes 6 servings Meringues: 2 egg whites pinch of fine sea salt ½ cup sugar, super-fine if possible ½ teaspoon vanilla extract ¼ teaspoon almond extract Lemon Cream: 1½ cups sugar ¹⁄³ cup potato starch…
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Picturing Today’s Conversos
In northern New Mexico’s Sandoval County, there is a tombstone of a World War II veteran in a cemetery nestled in the desert brush. The name of the man, who was born in 1921 and died in 1980, is Adonay P. Gutierrez, and it is engraved on the stone below a cross. Nine different Native…
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