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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Director Shows His ‘Stripes’
His directorial prowess led to the endearing marriage of slapstick comedy and supernatural lunacy known as “Ghostbusters,” but once upon a time, Ivan Reitman was merely a scared little Jewish boy. He was born in Czechoslovakia in 1946, shortly after his parents, Leslie and Clara, barely managed to survive the Holocaust. Their life together in…
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Translating the Language of Love
When Verónica Albin read Forward contributor Ilan Stavans’s “Dictionary Days” (Graywolf Press, 2005), she was stricken by the chapter in which he described looking up the word “love” in standard dictionaries in various languages and finding out, to his surprise, that each culture defines the term in divergent ways. Soon after, she convinced Stavans to…
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Bridging Body and Soul
Bearing the Body By Ehud Havazelet Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $24. The revelation buried within Ehud Havazelet’s first novel, “Bearing the Body,” is welcome and rare: Upon first opening its covers, the thought occurs that this novel, as a body of work, must have been borne of a heavy labor (Havazelet’s last book…
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Retracing Van Gogh’s Footsteps, Camera in Hand
In 2000, six months after the death of her husband, philanthropist Ted Arison, author Lin Arison took her granddaughter on a month-long journey through France, hoping that immersion in art would soothe their grief. While saddened by Van Gogh’s unrequited yearning for an artistic community, Arison was stricken by the intense connections between the other…
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Stating the Obvious
The story is told about Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference that, bored by a discussion about the role of the Vatican in postwar Europe, he asked brusquely, “How many divisions has the pope?” He had a point: The pope had none. And yet, although diplomatic verbal disputes often seem academic, the diplomats continue to…
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November 9, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward A heartbreaking letter written by a boy in Antwerp was brought into the offices of the Forward. Apparently, the boy, an emigrant from Eastern Europe, was left alone in Antwerp. His parents are somewhere in New York, but as of yet they have not been found. In part, the…
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A New Ruin Rising
Can a ruin still be called a ruin once it has been rebuilt? This is the not-so-theoretical question that visitors to Jerusalem’s Jewish quarter may be asking after strolling by the construction site where the preserved remains of the Hurva (Ruin) synagogue used to stand. Late last year, the Israeli government began work on a…
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The Jewish Gypsy
He is a resident of Seville who has devoted his life to preserving Gypsy music and dance from southern Spain. He founded an ensemble for that purpose, whose Spanish title means “art and purity.” And his name is… Ethan Margolis. So what’s a nice Jewish boy from the Midwest doing running a traditional flamenco group,…
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Klimt’s Last Retrospective
Museum officials are calling the exhibition now on display at New York’s Neue Galerie America’s first-ever Gustav Klimt retrospective. But can the eight paintings and 120 drawings on view be considered a true “retrospective”? The exhibition is not drawn from a variety of sources; it is, rather, made up of a single — albeit impressive…
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Securing a Father’s Place In American Social History
Abraham Epstein: The Forgotten Father of Social Security By Pierre Epstein University of Missouri Press, 344 pages, $39.95. Throughout the 1930s, the home of Abraham and Henriette Epstein, at 389 Bleecker Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, was a salon where political reformers ate, drank and argued about how to provide social insurance for older Americans….
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Darfur Activist Takes a Turn on the Silver Screen
The first time that Adam Sterling was in charge of organizing anything was his freshman year of college, when he sent a busload of underage students down to Tijuana, where they could drink legally. The only investment decision he had made up to that point was whether to purchase an Xbox 360 or wait until…
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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