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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Sebald in Israel
Snapshots By Michal Govrin Riverhead, 336 pages, $26.95. For contemporary novelists, using the scrapbook model — incorporating photographs and drawings along with text — is bound to raise comparisons with the beloved German novelist W.G. Sebald. The author, who died tragically young in 2001, revitalized the novel by loosening its bonds, rendering it less stiff…
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Headbanger’s Thrall
Try this one on for size: In 2001, the members of the band Gevolt — six Russian Israelis, ages 23 to 31, based out of Ashdod — released their first album, “Sidur,” a collection of heavy metal songs performed in Russian. Driven by traditional European metal concerns — paganism, glorious battles and passionate love —…
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Uncle Joe the Exquisite
Joseph Epstein is perhaps the smartest American alive who also writes well. That he has done so quietly, with impeccable modesty, is a mark of what might be called wisdom. His subjects have been oppositely rambunctious: literature, marriage and divorce, snobbery (“Snobbery,” 2002), envy (“Envy,” 2003) and friendship (“Friendship,” 2006), among others. Ambition? He wrote…
The Latest
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One Bagel, Two Bagel?
Rashi Fein from Boston writes: “For some years I have had a dispute with a dear friend. I say that the plural of bagel is bagel. He says that the plural of bagel is bagels. I explain my position by arguing that bagel is a Yiddish word and that ‘two bagels’ in Yiddish would be…
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September 21, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Yom Kippur services in a hall on New York City’s Clinton Street were disrupted on account of a fight over a chair. When Joseph Rand showed up in synagogue with his family, he discovered that one Herman Garber was in one of the seats he had reserved. Rand informed…
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Red Emma in Black and White
A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman By Sharon Rudahl New Press, 128 pages, $17.95. It should be of little surprise that Emma Goldman ended up a comic-book heroine. Now dead for nearly seven decades, Red Emma — anarchist, activist, advocate of women’s rights — is still an inspiration to the young, rebellious…
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Whither Klezmer?
Every generation of artists faces its own peculiar set of challenges. When the first klezmer revivalists began breathing fresh life into Jewish music in the early 1970s, their task was not a simple one. They had few role models, their audience was undeveloped and many were in the position of having to learn theira instruments…
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An American Fairy Tale, With a Twist
Away By Amy Bloom Random House, 256 pages, $23.95. For Russian immigrant Lillian Leyb, calling America “the land of opportunity” seems both an understatement and a misnomer. Lillian, whose exhilarating, heartbreaking and certainly never boring story is at the heart of Amy Bloom’s vivid novel “Away,” seizes upon the microcosm of the new frontier of…
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Hostage to History
Terror in Black September: The First Eyewitness Account of the Infamous 1970 Hijackings By David Raab Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pages, $24.95. The Palestinian fedayeen who hijacked David Raab’s plane on September 6, 1970, surely thought they had hit the jackpot. Seventeen-year-old, baby-faced Raab was still so excited from his summer vacation in Israel that he…
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A Different Aria
Anne Sofie von Otter, one of the world’s greatest mezzo-sopranos, has just unveiled an unexpected, and very personal, project: a record of music by Jewish composers confined in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Swedish opera singer first conceived of the unusual project when she sang at a forum on the Holocaust in Stockholm in the…
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Music From Her Own Mind
Look There: New and Selected Poems of Agi Mishol Translated Lisa Katz Graywolf Press, 112 pages, $14.00. Agi Mishol is a major minor poet, the kind with whom, as John Crowe Ransom said, “the poetic object is elected by a free choice… and this object, deliberately elected and carefully worked up by the adult poet,…
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