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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Kosher Tech
A few months back, one of my columns explored the ways in which the introduction of electricity in late-19th- and early-20th-century America affected religious ritual — unquestionably for the better. The impact of the very latest technology, from the Internet to third-generation cell phones, on American Jewish life of the 21st-century appears to be far…
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More Arms Than Shiva
The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein By Martin Duberman Alfred A. Knopf, 736 pages, $37.50. Barely a quarter of the way through “The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein,” Martin Duberman’s voluminous new biography of the arts patron who, through his partnership with choreographer George Balanchine, transformed American ballet, the subject has undertaken — with varying degrees of…
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Sopranos Chat: Tony Feuds With His Favorite Jew
Last year Forward.com editor Ami Eden wrote an essay arguing that mob boss Tony Soprano had a thick philosemitic streak inspired by a Jewish associate, Herman “Hesh” Rabkin. Did last week’s episode — with a Tony-Hesh feud — ruin the theory? Click here to hear from Eden and Forward associate editor Gabriel Sanders on the…
The Latest
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The Mob From Zion
Blood & Volume: Inside New York’s Israeli Mafia By Dave Copeland Barricade Books, 288 pages, $24.95. A decade before Tony and Carmela Soprano started bickering in New Jersey, a high-level cocaine dealer called Ron Gonen and his wife, Honey, were at each other’s throats in a Long Island mock-Tudor with three bedrooms and a two-car…
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April 27, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward In honor of its 10th anniversary, poet Morris Rosenfeld writes a paean to his favorite newspaper. The final stanzas read: After these ten years I still see Pharaoh’s power/I still see the Inquisition/I still can hear the devil laugh/With his bloody ambition/But I also hear you for ten hard…
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Paul Mazursky: Middle-class Champion
Every faith needs its defender, and no other filmmaker has championed middle-class mediocrity with the religious zeal of Paul Mazursky. Often mistaken for a liberal humanist, Mazursky habitually drops his bourgeois characters into a countercultural fishbowl and then celebrates their inevitable efforts to come up for air. His is the most ideologically conservative body of…
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Channeling Kafka in Buenos Aires
The Ministry of Special Cases By Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages, $25. Nathan Englander’s new novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases,” begins on a dark night in a dangerous time: Jews bury themselves the way they live, crowded together, encroaching on one another’s space. The headstones were packed tight, the bodies underneath elbow…
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Novel Jews: Nathan Englander
Nathan Englander will read from “The Ministry of Special Cases” as part of Novel Jews, the downtown literary series co-sponsored by the Forward and the 14th Street Y. The Jewish Book Council also sponsors this installment. Nathan Englander’s short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and numerous anthologies, including “The Best…
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Hollywood’s War on Hate
An exhibit at the New York campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion shows Hollywood movie posters from the Holocaust era. The posters, part of lawyer Ken Sutak’s personal collection, offer a glimpse into the Hollywood of the 1930s and ’40s, revealing how the film industry independently went to war against the Nazis starting…
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A Physician Examines His Profession’s Blind Spots
Jerome Groopman is a physician and clinical scientist at Harvard, a specialist in AIDS and cancer. He’s also a writer for The New Yorker, with a successful and thought-provoking series of books on such topics as the intersection of spirituality and medicine and the importance of a physician’s intuition. His new book “How Doctors Think”…
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The Other Disappeared
The architecture of Jewish memory has undergone explosive growth in recent years: Holocaust memorials and museums, plaques, donor walls — and works of literature, like “The Ministry of Special Cases,” Nathan Englander’s new novel about Argentina’s “disappeared,” the thousands of students, dissidents and labor leaders tortured and killed during seven years of military dictatorship. Between…
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