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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At-one-ment
‘Atonement” is an English word to which I had never given much thought. In fact, I had thought about it so little that I had always assumed that the possibility of reading it as “at-one-ment” was merely a kind of pun having nothing to do with its original meaning. It’s embarrassing to find out, therefore,…
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Yid Vid: A Great Miracle Happened One Year Ago Today
Today marks the first anniversary of a pivotal moment in Jewish history: Here’s a report from last year on this momentous occasion: Boston’s North Shore reclaimed the world record for largest shofar ensemble Sept. 17 when 798 participants sounded the shofar for 7 minutes, 50 seconds, on Phillips Beach in Swampscott, Mass. The Great Shofar…
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September 14, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward The Forward has learned of a planned attack on any and all progressive Jews by hooligans and criminals. The attack is scheduled for Yom Kippur, when many freethinking Jews meet in their clubhouses for nonreligious holiday events. Similar attacks occurred last year, though word on the street now is…
The Latest
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Heretic with Fries
Foreskin’s Lament By Shalom Auslander Riverhead, 320 pages, $24.95 Consider the poor foreskin: an object of desire for a few, a matter of indifference for many and anathema to the Jews. Like bacon and lobster, it serves as the very definition of treyf. Its rejection is the primordial sign of the Covenant. Consider, then, Shalom…
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The Last of The Ten
Joseph Solman, one of New York’s best and now nearly legendary painters, turns 98 this year. I don’t know if he still paints. The last thing I read about him was a 1999 New York Times article by Michael Kimmelman, which reported that the then-90-year-old artist was still working away in a “cluttered studio above…
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Revisiting ‘Green Pastures’
The Book of Psalms: A Translation With Commentary By Robert Alter W.W. Norton, 518 pages, $35. Robert Alter’s new edition of the Hebrew Psalms is not for everyone: It requires concentration, unfettered time and patience. Each newly translated psalm must be read through as a poem, then analyzed using the highly detailed footnotes, then reread…
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The Politics of Language
In her new book, ‘Jews and Power’ (Schocken/Nextbook), Harvard Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse discusses Jewish political adaptability through the ages. In the excerpt below, she shows how this flexibility showed itself most immediately via language. Since the inauguration of the Nobel Prizes at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews have received one-tenth of its…
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A Litvak’s Progress
In a conversation with the Forward’s Gabriel Sanders, Wisse discussed her own tale of linguistic adaptability, differing approaches to the language of the Bible and her take on Kabbalah. Gabriel Sanders: You begin your chapter with a discussion of Jewish Nobel laureates in literature and how striking their linguistic variety is. In considering your point,…
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Much to Atone For, Munich Makes Amends
Charlotte Knobloch, president of Germany’s Jewish community and one of only about 100 surviving Munich residents who returned after World War II, used to keep a suitcase packed at all times — ready to escape should antisemitism force her out again. Of course this city, the capital of prosperous Bavaria, is both enormously wealthy and…
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Second Home
Although he never actually lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for much of his life, Isaac Bashevis Singer visited almost daily, and the neighborhood became his “second home.” The relationship between writer and geographical muse is the focus of the exhibit Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side, a series of nearly 40 images…
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Passing Before the Divine Eye
In last week’s column on the Yiddish expression bobbe mayseh, we saw how folk etymologies, which explain rare or puzzling words by changing or relating them to words understood by everyone, may come into being when the original meanings of words are forgotten. An interesting example of this phenomenon in Jewish tradition involves the Rosh…
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