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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September 22, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward Poultry dealer Morris Frank was hauling a large truckload of chickens in New York City from Harlem to Hester Street, to be used as kapores (sacrifices) for Yom Kippur. The overloaded truck was whizzing down Central Park West when suddenly it smashed into a trolley car at 69th Street….
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Blitzkrieg Flop
The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: a secret History of Jewish Punk By Steven Lee Beeber Chicago Review Press, 272 pages, $24.95. By turns entertaining and infuriating, Steven Lee Beeber’s “The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s” is a study in contradictions: Rarely have so many carefully researched facts been placed in service of such deeply flawed arguments. Beeber’s basic…
The Latest
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A Jew Walks Into a Bar…
Yes, but Is It Good for the Jews? By Jonny Geller Bloomsbury, 208 pages, $15.95. “Our Pal, G-d” and Other Presumptions: A Book of Jewish Humor By Jeffry V. Mallow iUniverse, Inc. 192 pages, $16.95. Oy! The Ultimate Book of Jewish Jokes By David Minkoff St. Martin’s Press, 432 pages, $22.95. Funny is hard. Everyone…
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Jazzing Up Ancient Texts
In 2000, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb had just moved to Boston from Israel to attend the New England Conservatory when she received a care package from her mother. In it was a copy of ShirHaShirim, one of the five scrolls that constitute the third book of the Tanach. Many believe that King Solomon, born in Jerusalem…
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Reassessing FDR’s Legacy
In his counterfactual vision of the United States during World War II, “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth imagines a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator turned America Firster and Nazi sympathizer. President Lindbergh soon signs a nonaggression pact with Hitler, and pogroms and…
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New Book Incites Scholarly Fracas
As a book that that seeks to upend commonly held historical notions, Robert N. Rosen’s “Saving the Jews” is by its very nature a combative work. But even by Rosen’s standards, his 17th chapter is a confrontational one. It is here that he engages FDR’s detractors most directly, in language that prompted 55 scholars to…
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The Wicked Witch and the Straw Man
The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred and the Jews By David Mamet Schocken, 208 pages, $19.95. The world of Jewish identity is a buyer’s market. Those of us who “do Jewish” for a living or as an avocation (rabbis, writers, editors, artists, organizational pros, philanthropists) know that half our audience is only half-interested, while the rest…
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Found in Translation: A Round-up
Language, our first barrier, now also seems our last. Babel is one bookend of human communication; today’s instantaneous transmission of Babel through a baffling array of technologies is the other. Perhaps one of the oldest occupations, after the making of towers, is translation — that utopian and often invisible task of making one word mean…
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September 15, 2006
100 Years Ago in the forward East Broadway seltzer vendor Henry Mittleman was blown to bits last week after a seltzer tank exploded in the basement of his store. Mittleman, who was working just a few feet from the tank, was thrown more than 20 feet by the blast. After he arrived at the hospital,…
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Redrawing Family History
I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors By Bernice Eisenstein Riverhead Books, 192 pages, $23.95. Early in her new memoir, author-illustrator Bernice Eisenstein recalls the experience of having seen the 1982 Holocaust drama “Sophie’s Choice,” which arrived in theaters when she was in her early 30s. Eisenstein describes her deep, visceral response to the picture…
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Notes From the Edge
On Broadway, late summer is known as the off-season. But in the downtown theater world, life begins in August. Every year at this time, the kaleidoscopic burst of creativity known as the New York International Fringe Festival lights up Lower Manhattan. Now in its 10th year, North America’s largest multi-arts festival hosts hundreds of performances…
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