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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A Wiseguy’s Jewish Journey
Louis Ferrante was just a Mafia member from New York City who was serving time, until he began a jail-time journey that resulted in his conversion to Judaism after his release in 2003. In “Unlocked: A Journey From Prison to Proust” (HarperCollins), Ferrante chronicles his trip. Although the memoir focuses mainly on his days in…
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Refocusing Loss Through the Holocaust’s Lens
American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust By Laura Levitt NYU Press, 312 pages, $39. Although the Holocaust is increasingly visible in American life, it remains forbidden territory. We distance ourselves from it, bathing it in Hollywood homilies to the power of human kindness. We draw boundaries around it, housing it in concrete structures, hoping to…
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Listening In to the Field of Jewish Pop, High and Low
In music, as in life, there are cool kids and misfits. And in music, as in life, you sometimes find yourself rooting for the underdog. At least that’s what I found myself doing one recent afternoon, as I alternated between “Let’s Go Shleppin’!” a new CD by Meshugga Beach Party, out of Southern California, and…
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April 4, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward On Monday night, the New Atlantic Dance Hall, located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on Delancey Street between Forsyth and Chrystie Streets, was packed with hundreds of young Jews, all having a fine time, dancing the night away. At about 10 p.m., the manager, Isadore Weissman, noticed the presence…
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Myths and Facts
A common belief that turns out to be a myth, and an assumed myth that might be true: This is the balance sheet of my March 14 column, “Last Names, Lost In Translation.” For believing in the myth, I have been properly chastised by Arthur S. Abramson of Mansfield, Conn., and the novelist Dara Horn….
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Film & TV David’s the Singer, He’s the Rapper
Oded Turgeman, director of the new short film “Song of David,” doesn’t do things the easy way. As a burgeoning film director, he applied to Jerusalem’s most prestigious film school, with a commander in a combat unit as his only prior life experience. Then he moved to America to attend the American Film Institute —the…
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Unterzakhn, Part 4
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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Yid Vid: Two Ways of Celebrating Purim
The Nahariya way: The Bobover way:
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Are There Israeli Palestinians?
We may be through with my columns on “Arab Jews,” but not with some of the issues raised by them. Here’s a letter from Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld of Carlsbad, Calif.: “I have another, similar conundrum. A pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel lady with whom I wasted several months in fruitless correspondence referred in one of her communications to…
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Marvel’s Mavens
Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero By Danny Fingeroth Continuum, 183 pages, $24.95. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America By David Hajdu Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $26. The history of comics has been big recently, and there’ve been a number of…
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The Eye, And I, of the Ethnographer
Ashantee By Peter Altenberg Translated by Katharina von Hammerstein Ariadne Press, 128 pages, $15. In 1896, a group of people from the Ashanti tribe was displayed in an ethnographic exhibit in Vienna’s Prater, huts erected amid its Tiergarten, or zoo. There, to the delight of 5,000 to 6,000 visitors a day, they sang, danced the…
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