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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Extraordinary Nostalgia
Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography – the German and Early American Years By Joachim Prinz Edited and introduced by Michael A. Meyer Indiana University Press, 270 pages, $34.95 When it comes to portraying rabbinical figures, Philip Roth has not been the kindest writer around. Yet in his 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,” a…
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Schnorientalism: The Tao of Jews
As even the most tenuous speaker of Chinese can tell you, travels in that country mean having the same Inevitable Conversation over and over. And over. “Oh!” the locals will pretend to swoon. “Your Chinese is excellent!” “No, no,” comes your polite or honest reply. “It’s really nothing.” “Where are you from?” “What is your…
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Composing the Exile: Steve Bernstein’s Latest ‘Diaspora’ Album
Not many musicians appear both on the experimental jazz scene and in Anheuser-Busch ads, but then again, trumpeter Steve Bernstein is not your average musician. A polymath with prodigious chops, Bernstein — who in addition to composing is an arranger for pop albums, children’s TV shows and movie soundtracks — has been gigging some 34…
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Aleksander Skidan Sees ‘Red’
Aleksander Skidan has a talent that, like his nose, is poetically bent — left of center, pensively down-turned and seriously humorous. A poet and essayist by nature, and a translator by necessity, he is one of the foremost Russian writers of his turbulent generation. He was born in Leningrad in 1965 and lives in the…
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A Sarajevo Haggadah Inquiry
Jeremiah Riemer from Madison, N.J., writes: “I have a case for you having to do with journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks’ fascinating and inspiring New Yorker story about the Sarajevo Passover Haggadah. It involves the Hebrew root that gives us the word Haggadah, the literal meaning of which is ‘narration.’ Haggadah comes from the verb…
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February 1, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Judah Magnes has hit his Yahudim where it hurts. A few weeks ago, Rabbi Magnes of Temple Emmanuel gave a sermon in which he criticized those Jews who marry off their children to Christians in churches. Well-known businessman Louis Stern, a synagogue board member and trustee who recently had…
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Yid Vid: Writers’ Strike Leaves Woody Allen Speechless
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The Mistress of Mistrust: Reading Nadine Gordimer’s New Collection
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories By Nadine Gordimer Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages, $21. ‘Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories” is the 11th collection of stories by Nadine Gordimer, and though it is not her best, it is better by leaps, bounds and all African distance than the work of most…
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Baruch on Broadway
Although his philosophical masterpiece, “Ethics,” written in the notoriously exact and forbidding “geometrical mode,” is one of the least dramatic works in the history of modern philosophy, and despite the dryness of both his personality and his intensely private life, Baruch Spinoza has exercised the imagination of a long line of dramatists. The parched prose…
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A Poet of Israel’s Pain, And Its Hope
On Ruins & Return By Rachel Tzvia Back Shearsman Books, 104 pages, $15. It is written in the Talmud that after the destruction of the Second Temple, Rabbi Akiva and three prominent rabbis saw a fox scavenging through the Holy of Holies. Though the other rabbis wept, Akiva began to laugh, reminding his colleagues of…
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A New Life for ‘Lifelong Learning’
American Jews are often taken to task for their sins, for their indulgent appetites, dwindling attendance at synagogue and the rising rate of intermarriages. But look again. Here, there and everywhere throughout the nation, American Jews are burying their noses in books and burning the midnight oil: Adult education or, as its current iteration would…
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