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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Jewish Noir
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union By Michael Chabon HarperCollins, 432 pages, $26.95. On January 1, 2008, sovereignty over the Federal District of Sitka, the Jewish homeland in Alaska, “a crooked parenthesis of rocky shoreline running along the western edges of Baranof and Chichagof islands,” will revert to American control. When that happens, the Sitka District Police…
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Exploring Eastern Europe, Via America and Israel
Last month, Rutgers University staged a conference devoted to examining the ways in which the Eastern European Jewish experience has been reformulated and reimagined in Israel and in the United States. Titled “Beyond Eastern Europe,” the gathering was jointly sponsored by Rutgers’s Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and the Hebrew University’s Nevzlin…
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One Man’s Persistent Empathy
Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life By Sari Nusseibeh, with Anthony David Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 pages, $27.50. One day, at the end of 1987, Sari Nusseibeh was walking out of a lecture hall at Birzeit University, just having taught his students John Locke’s concepts of liberalism and tolerance, when he was set…
The Latest
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The Appeal of Alternate History
Few subgenres of literature have been subjected to such longstanding critical scorn as alternate history. Despite the occasional publication of such masterpieces as Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel, “The Man in the High Castle,” the more frequent appearance of duds like Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen’s much-maligned 1995 novel, “1945,” has reinforced alternate history’s reputation…
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Three Strangers, But Not for Long
There’s no set, no props and no intermission, yet “Rearviewmirror,” the newest offering from playwright Eric Winick, keeps audiences captivated from the moment it begins. In fact, the Reverie Productions show, playing at the 59E59 Theaters on New York City’s Upper East Side, is almost barren in its simplicity. It features just three characters —…
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Easy Reading for the Serious Music Set
Overture By Yael Goldstein Doubleday, 304 pages, $24.95. Golden-brown and beautiful, curvy in all the right places: a generous bottom, a bounteous top; the waist nicely pinched. Her measurements: 355 millimeters for the length of her back, 130 millimeters for the length of her neck. Ebony and ivory. What a body. And that’s just the…
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Leonard Cohen: Poet of the Holy Sinners
Book of Longing By Leonard Cohen Ecco Press, 240 pages, $24.95. Leonard Cohen has long been a poet of the sacred and profane. Like his fellow Jewish pop troubadours, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, Cohen has, for 50 years now, written and sung about love, God, temptation and sex — though arguably to greater extremes…
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A Distant Sound Now Nearer
Of the “degenerate Jews” whose work and lives were erased in the Nazi deluge, one of the most remarkable is Franz Schreker. He is also among the least known. Yet in the early years of the Weimar republic, Schreker was the most important German opera composer — in his heyday more highly regarded than Richard…
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April 20, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Jewish workers! It has already been three weeks that a bitter battle has been waged between bosses and striking workers in our neighborhood. On one side stand a few dozen reefer manufacturers — newly hatched little capitalists, they are, who have united in a bosses association. And on the…
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A Theater Stages New Show – and Controversy
Even before the first performance of “Last Jew in Europe,” the Jewish Theater of New York’s play penned by Tuvia Tenenbom, the show already had people up in arms. Citing the tragicomedy’s use of photographs of antisemitic graffiti purportedly shot on the streets of Lodz, the Polish Embassy said the pictures could turn American Jews…
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The Go-Between
Between 2002 and 2006, photographer Gillian Laub made more than a dozen trips to Israel and the Palestinian territories to shoot portraits of everyday people going about their lives. Those lives, often interrupted by violence and bearing the scars of the conflict, are explored in her new book, “Testimony” (Aperture). The Forward’s Rebecca Spence spoke…
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