Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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December 15, 2006
100 Years Ago In the Forward A cheering crowd of thousands of people eagerly greeted Russian Revolutionary hero Grigory Gershuni when he arrived in New York. Gershuni, a founder of the Socialist Revolutionary party, was also the founder of the Boyuvoya Organizatziye (Fighting Organization), a socialist militant group responsible for numerous assassinations of tsarist figures….
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Sunrise? Sunset?
Jewish culture in Miami Beach: a faded memory, or something that is alive and kicking, though occasionally interrupted by bursts of absurdity? Two new programs — one upcoming on PBS, the other in constant reruns on VH1 — offer opposing views of the state of Yiddishkeit in south Florida’s glitziest strip of sand. “Where Neon…
The Latest
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A Textured Trilogy of Ghetto Life
The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto By Chava Rosenfarb Translated from the Yiddish by the author, in collaboration with Goldie Morgentaler Book One: On the Brink of the Precipice, 1939 The University of Wisconsin Press, Terrace Books, 314 pages, $16.95. Book Two: From the Depths I Call You, 1940-1942…
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‘Shuckle Rock’ Puts the Pray
On a recent evening, Daniel Seliger leaned against the rickety steps of a graffiti-covered loft building in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, his left hand wrapped around a crumpled paper bag from which the mangled pop-top of a once-frosty Heineken peeked out. Like anyone who has been in the music industry for more than a…
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Lyrics Sparkle in Yiddish ‘Pirates of Penzance’
Poetry, Robert Frost wrote, is what gets lost in translation. Or not, as the case may be. Witness the work of Al Grand, the man behind the Yiddish version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance,” which was presented recently by the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene. Grand’s “Di Yam Gazlonim!” which ran until November 12…
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One Man’s Collection of Jewish Art Finds New Home
Shortly after graduating from Williams College, Sigmund Balka moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the Kennedy administration and decided to collect art. While his collecting interests ranged from modernist prints to Inuit art, Balka was especially drawn to the work of Jewish artists. Even at this young age, Balka perceived the collection of works…
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Looking Back December 8, 2006
100 Years Ago in the forward After marrying and then dumping at least four women, serial groom Samuel Shopkin has been busted and is now sitting alone in a cell in the Tombs. Lining up to testify against him are his first wife, Dora Shvalsboim-Shopkin, and his second wife, Minnie Trommer-Shopkin. Two other women have…
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Dancing with Demons
Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins By Amanda Vaill Broadway, 539 pages, $40. By all accounts, Jerome Robbins, the man behind “Fancy Free,” “Dances at a Gathering,” “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof” — and, for many years, George Balanchine’s number two at the New York City Ballet — was a perfectionist, an…
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After Years of Decline, Cantorial Music Gets a Second Act
This past Sunday, a concert featuring a Hasidic cantor and 64 members of the New York Philharmonic drew 4,000 listeners to a sold-out Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Tickets went for as much as $250, and those on the waiting list numbered more than 1,000. Last month, at a conference co-sponsored by the Conservative…
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Tiny Ninja Talmudists
It doesn’t even start out like a normal puppet show. The puppeteer — yes, there is a puppeteer — stands behind the table. He lays out a clock, a prayerbook, a pair of smiley-face finger puppets (yes, there are puppets, at least), and a plate of, uh, plastic food and chattering teeth. And then he…
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An Eastern European ‘Exodus’
A Day of Small Beginnings By Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum Little, Brown and Company, 384 pages, $24.99. ‘I think our ghosts are everywhere, all the time,” a young Polish man tells a visiting American Jew in Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum’s deeply heartfelt first novel. “The past does not leave us. And we do not leave the past.”…
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