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 Melody of Jewish Meditation
When I asked composer Daniel David Feinsmith what his former life as a Zen monk had entailed, he had a ready answer. “Well,” he told me by phone from San Francisco, “it involved celibacy. It involved meditation — hours facing a blank wall. And it involved frugality.” Normally, the word “celibacy” would be the showstopper…
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David Yazbek’s Other, Unnoticed Career
David Yazbek, the acclaimed composer and pianist, is no stranger to accolades and notoriety. His work on the Broadway musicals “The Full Monty” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” has earned him two Tony nominations (“Two Time Tony Award Loser!” his Web site proclaims); he’s won an Emmy for his comedy writing on “Late Show With David…
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In the Beginning, There Was Vitebsk
Vitebsk: The Life of Art By Aleksandra Shatskikh, translated by Katherine Foshko Tsan Yale University Press, 408 pages, $55. In the beginning, otherwise known as the year 988, Rus converted to Christianity, Vitebsk was founded and 1,000 years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, which was good. Today a backwater of fascist Belarus, Vitebsk had always…
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If He Had World Enough and Time
A tip for the brainy, leisurewear-oriented hipster: Type George Steiner’s name into Amazon.com’s search engine, and you’ll find, among his books of cultural and literary criticism, a novel about Hitler, a memoir titled “Errata: An Examined Life” and, of especial curiosity, a T-shirt emblazoned with a cherry-red heart that’s framed by the words “I Love…
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What if Hitler Were a Jewish Supremacist?
The Jewish Messiah By Arnon Grunberg, translated by Sam Garrett Penguin Press, 470 pages, $27.95. ‘The biggest mistake fascism made was to turn against the Israelite,” a character says in Arnon Grunberg’s new novel, “The Jewish Messiah.” “If fascism had absorbed the Israelite, if fascism had said to the Israelite: Come, let us join forces,…
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Gershom Scholem’s Life, in His Own Words
Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919 By Gershom Scholem Edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 384 pages, $39.95. In the early 1970s, Vienna-born writer and memoirist Jakov Lind returned to Israel after experiencing a mystical vision “on a very fine day about 3 in…
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A Mother’s Life
Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir By David Rieff Simon and Schuster, 192 pages, $21. David Rieff, the only son of sociologist Philip Rieff and writer Susan Sontag, has written a memoir about his mother’s death, in December 2004, of complications from myelodysplastic syndrome, commonly known as MDS. Sontag, among the most…
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Faced With Death, an Unlikely Heroine Emerges
The Book of Dahlia By Elisa Albert Free Press, 288 pages, $23. It sounds almost like the beginning of a terrible joke: What happens when a 29-year-old who has wasted much of her life gets a brain tumor? Except that instead of a joke, this is the premise of Elisa Albert’s new novel, “The Book…
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Last Names, Lost in Translation
Dennis Fleishman of Toms River, N.J., has a question that, he writes, “has been lingering in my mind for quite some time. What determines the pronunciation in English of the vowel in names ending in ‘-stein’? Sometimes it’s pronounced like the vowel in ‘pie’ and sometimes like the vowel in ‘feet.’ Is there a rule…
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Billy Crystal Is Yankees’ ‘Designated Hebrew’
The Yankees have been without a significant Jewish player for quite some time, but that is all about to change with yesterday’s minor-league signing. Billy Crystal — yes, that Billy Crystal — has signed a one-day minor-league contract with the Yankees and will be playing in an exhibition spring-training game against the Pittsburgh Pirates on…
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March 21, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The Forward has been flooded with letters, postcards and telegrams, and the phone has been ringing off the hook, all on account of a Bintel Brief letter we printed in Wednesday’s paper from a 14-year-old orphan whose tragic story touched many hearts. The girl, whose letter detailed how her…
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