Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Writing in Four Dimensions
Avram Davidson was a midcentury, American writer of fantastic fiction whose imagination would inherit the galaxy, and more. His stories and novels of time travel and alternate universes transcended almost everything earthly, even as their author was bound to poverty and mainstream neglect. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction called Davidson the genre’s “most explicit literary…
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A Birthday Celebration for Curacao’s Historic Synagogue
As evening fell in Willemstad in Curacao on April 16, scores of well-dressed people headed to the narrow Hanchi di Snoa, and into the courtyard of the Snoa — Curacao’s venerable synagogue built in 1732, home to Congregation Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, the oldest surviving synagogue in the Americas, and one where no Sabbath or major holiday…
The Latest
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Life After Death
Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life By Jon D. Levenson Yale University Press, 274 pages, $40. For many non-Orthodox Jews, the concept of the physical resurrection of the dead has always been difficult. Prayers mentioning the doctrine — including such central texts as the second paragraph of…
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Dangerous Sport
Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 By David Clay Large W.W. Norton & Company, 416 pages, $27.95. Next year, the Summer Olympic Games will take place in Beijing. This choice of location was a controversial decision by the International Olympic Committee, owing to concerns in the West that China could use the Olympics as a…
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Books Borat: From Silver-Screen Star to Scribe
As I watched the bonus outtakes on the DVD version of Sacha Baron Cohen’s box-office hit, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” I realized that while the Borat routine might get old in the temporal sense, it somehow never stops being funny. That’s why I was excited to read…
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Film & TV The Jewish Sandman
The Forward has earned a reputation for uncovering the Jewish ancestry of figures both real and fictional. Comics, in particular, have been a rewarding realm of inquiry: My friend and former colleague Max Gross outed The Thing, while executive editor Ami Eden discovered an uncanny Jewish X-Men connection. So it was only natural that we’d…
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Susan Sontag: Juggler of the Moral and the Aesthetic
At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches By Susan Sontag, Edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $23. In his foreword to “At the Same Time,” the new collection of essays and speeches by his mother, the late Susan Sontag, David Rieff writes: “It is sometimes said of my…
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A Window on the Western Wall
The Western Wall may be the holiest Jewish site, but it isn’t commonly associated with high art. It is more the province of sentimental pictures and tourist trinkets. “Solomon’s Wall,” a majestic painting that commanded $3,624,000 at Christie’s New York last month, was an exceptional example, an emotional rendering by a non-Jew who was Russia’s…
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S. Yizhar’s Birth of a Nation
Preliminaries By S. Yizhar Translated by Nicholas de Lange The Toby Press, 312 pages, $24.95. A memoir of an extraordinary life written in an ordinary manner is no great memoir. A memoir of an ordinary life written in an extraordinary manner is no great memoir, either. But what of a memoir of an extraordinary life…
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Building a New Middle East — Through Soccer and Weight Loss
Coaches, take heart: Sports may promote peace. During the famous “Christmas Truce” of 1914, British and German soldiers called an unofficial cease-fire and played a game of soccer. In 1971, China and the United States came together over a game of table tennis. For the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, North and South Korean athletes competed…
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An Arts Space Rises by the Banks of Brooklyn’s Eerie Canal
From the outside, the structure resembles a fancy feed-storage bin: two converted oil silos overlooking Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. Inside, the space recalls a rustic lodge. But while the unique edifice may be what draws people to Issue Project Room, it’s what’s produced inside that gets people to stay — and return. Besides, as Suzanne Fiol,…
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