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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Virtual Tzedakah Box Collects Real Dollars
For decades, Jews have dropped loose change in those tzedakah boxes found on countertops in Jewish stores and in Hebrew schools. Now, one person is modernizing this charitable act for the 21st century. Ben Vorspan, founder of Inspired Multimedia, launched MyJewishPortal.com three weeks ago as a community Web site that connects synagogues, organizations and individuals….
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November 2, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward For the second time, Yiddish theater director Jacob Gordin was denied all rights to the play “God, Man, and Devil” in New York’s Supreme Court. The judge also barred director David Kessler from casting actor Jacob Adler in the starring role. Gordin, who bought the play from Kessler in…
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Strangers in a Strange Land
Israeli cinema has made some notable strides over the past few years, thanks to a new generation of documentarians and the bohemian visions of the likes of Eytan Fox (“Walk on Water,” “The Bubble”) and Avi Nesher (the entertainingly ambitious “The Secret,” which may be the world’s first lesbian-Kabbalah-grrl power-yeshiva drama). These filmmakers have taken…
The Latest
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A Life Torn Between Myth and Fact
Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life By Philip Davis Oxford University Press, 400 pages, $34.95. A writer both of the real and of great fantasy, Bernard Malamud was a man whose biography can be read in those two not necessarily contradictory ways: Realistically, he was a stooped, myopic, Brooklyn-born professor of literature who wrote various and…
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Trailblazing Book Reminds Us How Far We’ve Come
The 1950s cast a long shadow over contemporary America. Every week, or so it seems, we’re busy marking the 50th anniversary of one postwar phenomenon after another, from the birth of Levittown and the threat of Sputnik to the flowering of the civil rights movement. These bursts of historical consciousness are all to the good,…
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Two Israels, Unspooled
If a country’s movies are a barometer of its emotions (and they often are), the 59th year of the State of Israel has been a bummer. In the aftermath of a disastrous incursion into Lebanon, saddled with a do-nothing government, Israelis of all stripes are dismayed by their current state of affairs. And the movies…
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When Coinages Don’t Take
New York resident Gil Kulick writes to ask why, despite the great efforts made to find modern Hebrew equivalents for common words that did not exist in premodern Hebrew, Israeli Hebrew still uses foreign borrowings for such basic terms as bank, student, muzika, universita and historiya. “Or,” Mr. Kulick asks, “did the creators of modern…
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Film & TV ‘Tribe’ Tops iTunes
Just months after winning awards and garnering critical acclaim at film festivals, “The Tribe,” a documentary on what it means to be Jewish in the 21st-century has moved to #1 on the iTunes top-selling short films list. The 18-minute film chronicles the modern Jewish American experience through archival footage, graphics and animation and is downloadable…
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October 26, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward The parents of 17-year-old Ida Milner were worried sick after their daughter disappeared from their home in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn more than six weeks ago. They reported the missing girl to the police and mentioned the name Abraham Krimko as her current boyfriend, but nothing turned up….
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The Anti-Chagall
They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust By Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett University of California Press, 412 pages, $39.95. Mayer Kirshenblatt was born in 1916 in the Polish town of Apt. In 1934, when he was 17, Mayer, his mother and his three siblings immigrated…
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Scrapbook Inquiry
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice By Janet Malcolm Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25. Given her belief in the instability of knowledge, Janet Malcolm is, on principle, always at a loss for clear answers. Instead, she has mastered the finely honed question. In “The Silent Woman,” what interested Malcolm — and the happily implicated reader…
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