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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Books
Klinghoffer: God Is a Conservative; Alterman: Jesus Is a Liberal
It gives me great pleasure to announce the upcoming publication of a book from Forward columnist David Klinghoffer, titled “How Would God Vote?: Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative,” which is due out this summer from Doubleday. But while Klinghoffer believes that God is a conservative, Nation columnist Eric Alterman apparently thinks…
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Film & TV Natalie Portman Says She and Scarlett Johansson are the ‘Hot Knishes’
Natalie Portman speaks at length with the Times of London about a variety of topics, including her dating patterns, why being an only child made her career possible and why Stephen Fry was her all-time favorite co-star. She also touched on her Jewish identity. Asked whether her ethnic background has been a stabilizing influence, she…
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Books Songbook Recaptures Lost Melodies
Heard any good Yiddish folksongs lately? Chances are good that the answer is “no.” Not because there aren’t any good Yiddish folksongs to be heard; for generations, the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe sang innumerable songs about love and loss, death and marriage. They sang to their children to soothe them to sleep, and they…
The Latest
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Books The Water Carrier
Renowned scholar David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind chair in Yiddish literature and culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The following excerpt is from his forthcoming memoir, “Yiddishlands” (Wayne State University Press). In the work, Roskies discusses his life and the life of his mother, and explores the Yiddish experience and historical…
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From Raj to Riches, Tevye Hits Delhi
Despite the fact that almost all her knowledge of Jews and Jewish culture comes from a couple of books and the film “Schindler’s List,” Renu Chopra, a slight Hindu woman raised in the north Indian state of Punjab, plays a surprisingly convincing Yente, the nosy shtetl matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof.” “I’ve never met…
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Hasidic Rabbi by Day, Pop Artist by Night
Punctuating his dark suit, Yitzchok Moully wears a bright-pink yarmulke, orange socks and a green tie. Moully, a youth director at the Chabad Jewish Center in Basking Ridge, N.J., wears both of his identities — Hasidic rabbi by day, painter by night — proudly. Although influenced by many sources, Moully’s style is reminiscent of Andy…
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Alone With a Secret
An Israeli military plane lands in a bleak African field. Huddled masses of Ethiopian Jews furtively board the plane before it takes off again. The camera shifts to the face of one terrified boy. A haunting soprano melody provides the soundtrack. From these early moments in “Live and Become,” a film by Romanian director Radu…
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Brownsville Boy
Alfred Kazin: A Biography By Richard M. Cook Yale University Press, 464 pages, $35. Of Alfred Kazin’s serried and august friends and enemies, people still know a lot: Irving Howe and Richard Hofstadter, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt — they all wrote grand books that will long outlive them, or…
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Nu!
Among the best-known words in the language, nu is sometimes heard in English these days, but rarely among non-Jews and never with the vast range of meaning that it can have in Yiddish. Things have changed considerably since 1958 or ’59 when I went tearing out of the room where I’d been watching “December Bride”…
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Defending Jacob Riis
Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York By Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom The New Press, 288 pages, $35. As incredible as this might seem to some, the generation born in the 1980s has no knowledge of a dangerous New York City. Criminals, the crack epidemic and the streetscapes of starving…
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No More Etrogs
‘No More Etrogs” was the title of a February 7 column by well-known political commentator Ari Shavit in the Israeli daily paper Ha’aretz. In his column, Shavit criticized the Winograd Commission’s report on the 2006 war in Lebanon for dealing too leniently with the government, and wrote, “The etrog syndrome has become a threat to…
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