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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Rabbis and Chickens
Rabbis & Their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896-1930 By Ira Robinson University of Calgary Press, 200 pages, $34.95. On a wintry Friday afternoon, at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, I was taking leave of my father, who, in the last year of his life, was recovering from a severe bout…
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Where Once They Burned Books…
Most Jewish-related anniversaries in Germany are commemorations of tragedy. But this season marked 25 years since the establishment of a remarkable postwar creation — a feat of hope and foresight happily enjoying continued success. Located steps away from the shopping district on Kurfürstendamm, the Literaturhandlung is one of seven shops throughout Germany that make up…
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A Musical Midrashist
Composer Michael Isaacson has returned to his roots — and not quietly. In the 1960s, Isaacson helped instigate the American Jewish camp song movement before moving on to a career writing music for film and television — composing the themes for “Days of Our Lives,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “The Bionic Woman.” Eventually, Isaacson returned to…
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Star-Crossed Sabras
If You Awaken Love By Emuna Elon Translated by David Hazony The Toby Press, 229 pages, $14.95. Adolescence is the age of fanaticism. It is the age at which we first fall in love. It is the age at which our politics, and our tastes in God and in art, have often become the most…
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Even Zhlubs Can Turn Lemons Into Lemonade
The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories By Max Apple The Johns Hopkins University Press, 184 pages, $19.95. When it comes to Max Apple, what’s not to like? Over the past three decades, in six books and two screenplays, he has shown himself to be a funny guy. And he has always been —…
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A Bur in the Talmudist’s Side
Forward reader Kenny Steinman writes: “In a recent Talmud lesson, my friends and I came across the Hebrew term bur in the sense of an unlettered person or ignoramus. Might this be related to the biblical ba’ar, as in the verse in Psalms that begins, Ish ba’ar lo yeda, ‘The dull man does not know’?…
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First Night Yid Vid: In Israel, Even the Monkeys Celebrate Hanukkah
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On Elvis Presley’s Birthday, The Jewish Elvis Who Stalked Michael Moore
Willard Morgan is Jelvis — “the Jewish Elvis.” True, he’s not the only Jewish Elvis. In fact, he isn’t even the only “Jelvis.” But, it seems safe to say, Morgan is the only Jewish Elvis (or Jelvis, for that matter) who has stalked filmmaker Michael Moore. When he’s not busy channeling “the King” in songs…
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November 30, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward In last week’s Forward, a letter from Cyrus Sulzburger was printed. In it, he complained that we had wrongly editorialized against the Jewish Territorialist Organization plan to settle Jewish immigrants in the south and west of the country, because conditions for working people were so bad. This week, the…
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The Show Goes On: Venerable Argentinean Playhouse Celebrates 75 Years
The Asociación Israelita Argentina Pro Arte Idischer Folks Teater marked its 75th anniversary last month, a reminder that Buenos Aires once was, with Moscow, Warsaw and New York, a pillar of the Yiddish stage. Most of Buenos Aires’s Yiddish playhouses vanished by 1960, but the show goes on at the IFT, even if the performances…
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The Art of Recovery
The hauntingly beautiful, large-scale black-and-white works that made up Norwegian artist Anne-Karin Furunes’s recent American solo debut are instantly arresting. Viewers are confronted by faces of anonymous women, closely cropped but reproduced to measure more than 5 feet by 7 feet, each with a penetrating gaze of melancholy and defiance, bewilderment and resignation. Approaching more…
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