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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MC Citizen: Israeli Rapper Subliminal Tours Stateside
Imagine a rap mogul — Eminem, say, or Jay-Z — playing the role of cultural ambassador: praising the work of police officers, telling the youth of the country to be patriotic citizens, smiling at fans from the steps of the White House. Such is the case with Ya’akov Shimoni, aka Subliminal, the Israeli rap sensation…
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Survival Ode: Fred Wander’s Wartime Story
The Seventh Well By Fred Wander Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann W.W. Norton, 192 pages, $23.95. Fritz Rosenblatt was born in 1917 to Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Vienna, and died as Fred Wander in Vienna in 2006; his adopted surname was meant to describe the years in between. He spent his adolescence revisiting the…
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Side by Side: Irish and Jews in American Theater
Last fall, two Broadway shows by Jewish-Irish collaborators, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s “The Glorious Ones” and Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan’s “Young Frankenstein,” opened on Broadway. These ethnic pairings would have no more significance than a Gallagher and Shean sketch were it not for the fact that the two groups have intersected again and…
The Latest
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The Shah Has Died
Zev Shanken of Teaneck, N.J., has an interesting question about chess, the modern Hebrew word for which is shah.mat, spelled hngy, with a Tet as its final letter. Since shah.mat comes from Russian shakhmaty, which is related to English “checkmate”; and since both these words, like similar expressions in other European languages (for example, Italian…
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Museum Woe
The news that the Eldridge Street Synagogue, aka Khal Adas Jeshurun Anshe Lubz — once one of the most architecturally distinctive houses of worship on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side — has, at the conclusion of a 20-year-long restoration project, turned itself into the innocuous-sounding Museum at Eldridge Street, is cause for both celebration and…
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January 4, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward As a large-scale rent strike engulfs Manhattan’s Lower East Side, more than 150 strikers were called into Municipal Court on charges of failing to pay their rent. Of those standing accused, only one was sentenced by the court to leave his dwelling. With his landlord and the building’s housekeeper…
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December 28, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Over the past few weeks, there has been a man, known in the press as “Jack the Ripper,” who has a penchant for cutting off pieces of women’s clothing on the Brooklyn-Manhattan subway line. This week, Samuel Buchbinder, a suspender maker from Brownsville, was riding the subway into work…
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Film & TV ADL ‘Accepts’ Will Smith’s Clarification, JDL Supports Writers’ Strike
So the Anti-Defamation League has finally weighed in on L’Affaire Will Smith, and, I have to say, its statement is a little disappointing. To recap: Will Smith, speaking off the cuff to a Scottish newspaper, suggested — quite reasonably — that Hitler was driven by a “twisted” notion of what he thought was “good.” The…
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Yid Vid: Chabon Speaks
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon speaks about the controversy surrounding his book “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” how he feels about Israel, getting compared to Philip Roth and being a geek. Crackerjack Judeo-Christian reporter Brad Greenberg asks all the right questions (although I do sort of wish he had asked Chabon whether he loves his wife…
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Film & TV Will Smith Is No Hitler-Lover (and Will Someone Please Get TMZ.com a Subscription to the Forward)
In October, it was Halle Berry. She found herself in the celebrity hot seat, apologizing profusely following an innocent, if clumsy, remark that only the most hysterical among us would view as evidence of antisemitism. This month, apparently, it’s Will Smith’s turn. In a rambling interview published in Scotland’s Daily Record, Smith was quoted as…
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Keeping It in the Family
Who by Fire, Who by Blood By Jon Papernick Exile Editions, 346 pages, $26.95. The Jewish season of repentance is intended to broaden feelings of guilt — from daily activities to a smorgasbord of global and personal actions over the year that has passed. The world is not independent of us; we make it what…
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