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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A Lost Original Springs Up Anew
The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague By Yudl Rosenberg Edited and translated by Curt Leviant Yale University Press, 256 pages, $25. In our sci-fi era of real commercial robots, which can be programmed to vacuum and to act as surrogate pets, the Jewish legend of the 16th-century rescuer Golem of…
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Sisters of Men
Faced with unexpected peril and opportunity, the new Israel Defense Forces chief of staff spirits a crack combat unit to the United States, where the hunt is already on for a young fellow — a hunt so desperate, one would think he was the last man on earth. As far as she knows, he is….
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Breaking Down the Break-fast
In its embrace of the new, American Jewry has given rise to any number of far-reaching ritual practices, from kosher-style cuisine to lavish bar mitzvah celebrations. But the one that really takes the cake is the post-Yom Kippur break-fast, a phenomenon that seems to have grown steadily in popularity over the years, eclipsing even the…
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Losing an Exclamation Point, and Then Some
For Zionists of a certain age and temperament, no home was complete without a prominently placed copy of Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s “O Jerusalem!” A secular Bible of sorts, Collins and Lapierre’s popular-historical chronicle of the founding of the State of Israel testified to the essential rightness of the Jewish cause, even as it…
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Great Day on Eldridge
In 1958, a group of renowned Jazz musicians posed for a now iconic image known as “A Great Day in Harlem.” Inspired by this precedent, this month Yale Strom will bring together musicians from around the world specializing in klezmer for “Great Day on Eldridge,” a 10-day series of concerts and programs in New York…
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September 28, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward W Julius Hurvitz, who runs a New York City butcher shop on First Street, was arrested along with his wife, family and a group of customers for being open on a Sunday. Hurvitz was running an active business when a policeman walked into his store and demanded he close…
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Posters From a Doomed City
In 1941, the Jews of Vilna were herded into a ghetto. By 1943, most of the Jews in this ghetto were killed, despite the armed resistance of a few. This is the narrative that most Jews today have internalized — perhaps with one addendum. Many of the tens of thousands of Jews in the Vilna…
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The New Atheism: What’s a Liberal, Spiritual Jew To Do?
For the past four years, Jay Michaelson has offered Forward readers a panoply of diverse contributions — news pieces about “emerging Jewish spiritualities” and reviews of works from Franz Rosenzweig to “Meshugga Beach Party”; essays on paganism and sensuality, politics and homosexuality; expositions on Hanukkah, Purim and several Torah parshiot, and several pointed (and sometimes…
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Sebald in Israel
Snapshots By Michal Govrin Riverhead, 336 pages, $26.95. For contemporary novelists, using the scrapbook model — incorporating photographs and drawings along with text — is bound to raise comparisons with the beloved German novelist W.G. Sebald. The author, who died tragically young in 2001, revitalized the novel by loosening its bonds, rendering it less stiff…
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Headbanger’s Thrall
Try this one on for size: In 2001, the members of the band Gevolt — six Russian Israelis, ages 23 to 31, based out of Ashdod — released their first album, “Sidur,” a collection of heavy metal songs performed in Russian. Driven by traditional European metal concerns — paganism, glorious battles and passionate love —…
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Uncle Joe the Exquisite
Joseph Epstein is perhaps the smartest American alive who also writes well. That he has done so quietly, with impeccable modesty, is a mark of what might be called wisdom. His subjects have been oppositely rambunctious: literature, marriage and divorce, snobbery (“Snobbery,” 2002), envy (“Envy,” 2003) and friendship (“Friendship,” 2006), among others. Ambition? He wrote…
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