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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The Times’ Mevaseret Zion Correspondent
Stuart Pilichowski knows how to make his voice heard. Since moving to Israel in 1999, the 52-year-old garment company agent from Fairlawn, N.J., has been busy writing letters home – often addressed to newspapers. Whether he’s responding to critiques of Israeli counterterrorism tactics in New York’s Village Voice or an article in a vegetarian publication…
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Hebrew vs. Jewish
Bert Horwitz from Asheville, N.C., writes: “Recently, while listening to Prokofiev’s ‘Overture on Hebrew Themes,’ which is music with decidedly Yiddish refrains, it struck me that the difference between ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Jewish’ needs illuminating. Can the intellectual de-legitimization of Israel be due to the mistaken notion that, because a Jew is a follower of Judaism,…
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Kissinger, Unearthed
Henry Kissinger and the American Century By Jeremi Suri Belknap Press, 368 pages, $27.95. Henry Kissinger is probably going to regret the day in 1979 when he said this: “The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.” It’s not…
The Latest
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The Mongrel’s Lament
In late 2001, an attacked America prepares once again to defend a free world, mainland Europe mires in decadence and, in Alessandro Piperno’s debut novel, “The Worst Intentions”(Europa Editions), Daniel Sonnino makes a youthful attempt to reconcile the peoples of his past: Jewish, Catholic, Italian. Born of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Sonnino…
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New Restitution Claim Emerges in Sweden
Sweden’s museum of modern art is facing its first claim for Nazi-era displaced art: an Emil Nolde painting that went missing when a Frankfurt businessman tried to ship his artworks from Germany in 1939. The government recently decided that the Moderna Museet in Stockholm must resolve the claim for the painting it bought 40 years…
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The Outsiders
Few great writers have been as lionized and as vilified as Oscar Wilde. An Irishman who sought to be embraced by English society, he quickly became one of England’s most in-demand celebrities and one of the world’s most-produced and most-translated writers, only to be sentenced to prison for homosexuality — or, more correctly, bisexuality —…
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‘The Ethiopian Jews of Israel’
‘The Ethiopian Jews of Israel: Personal Stories of Life in the Promised Land” (Jewish Lights Publishing), a new book of interviews conducted by Len Lyons and containing photographs by Ilan Ossendryver, explores the complexities of the modern Ethiopian-Israeli experience. For years, thousands of Ethiopians waited to be airlifted to a land of milk and honey,…
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July 20, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward Frieda Singer, a young mother, was arrested along with two of her friends, Adele Finkelstein and Anna Segal. The three ladies were stopped from sitting with their babies on the grass in Mount Morris Park, in the Harlem section of Manhattan. Police first arrested Singer, who refused to vacate…
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A Legend Looks Back: A Visit With Kirk Douglas
Los Angeles – Over the course of an illustrious Hollywood career spanning more than five decades, Kirk Douglas has played many parts: Vincent Van Gogh, Spartacus and boxer Midge Kelly, to name just a formidable few. But the one character he has never played — to his deep regret, he now says — was that…
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Comic Artist Remembers, Sort of
Stop Forgetting To Remember: The Autobiography of Walter Kurtz By Peter Kuper Crown, 208 pages, $19.95. Every Forward reader, it is safe to say, knows Ben Katchor’s work, and almost as many would recognize the contributions of Art Spiegelman. Since the 2000 publication of Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” the in-house…
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In the Presence of Genius
New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) By David Shapiro The Overlook Press, 240 pages, $21.95. What is there to say? Prodigious, brilliant, David Shapiro has lived in many worlds of art, including music and painting. Shapiro is also the author of four books of criticism: on poet John Ashbery, and on artists Jim Dine, Jasper Johns…
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