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 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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The Ivy’s Barbed Embrace
Thousands of American Jewish households were on edge this month awaiting a special guest. No, it wasn’t Elijah the Prophet. It was the college admissions office. Will Chloe and Jonah be headed for Princeton next fall? Or have they set their sights on Harvard? Yale? The University of Michigan, or is it Wellesley? What about…
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Taking Parnassus by Sheer Force of Wit
Selected Poems (American Poets Project) By Kenneth Koch, edited by Ron Padgett The Library of America, 220 pages, $20. Kenneth Koch has not received his due, in part because his Harvard classmates and close friends, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, have overshadowed him, and in part because he could be rambunctiously funny. Poetry, after all,…
The Latest
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Now 95, a Journalist Finally Looks Back
Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story By Ruth Gruber Schocken, 288 pages, $27.50. In a photograph that still haunts me weeks after I first saw it, a young girl, perhaps 7 years old, faces the camera, clutching a toy. An older boy — 9 or 10 — holds…
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Primo Levi’s Second Language
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Primo Levi’s death. To commemorate the occasion, W.W. Norton & Company is releasing “A Tranquil Star,” a selection of the author’s previously untranslated short stories. Though clearly a tribute, the book is also being touted as a kind of reintroduction to the Italian master: Not only was Levi…
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April 13, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Police arrested Sofia Rosenthal, a resident of Brooklyn, on the suspicion that something untoward occurred with the baby to which she recently gave birth. The infant has since gone missing, and Rosenthal claims that she has no idea what happened to it. In the meantime, a dead baby was…
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The Ghost Exhibition
When Max Stern, owner of the Dominion Gallery in Montreal, died in 1987, he was one of the most important art dealers in Canada. As his estate was liquidating the 5,000 works held at Dominion, representatives came across evidence of another, less voluntary liquidation: Fifty years earlier, Stern’s original gallery — Galerie Stern in Düsseldorf—…
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A Perfect Pairing Of Worker and Work
Duke Ellington once said that there are only two kinds of music: good music, and the other kind. It follows that the good stuff ought to come in a variety of forms. To name but a few: There’s the stuff that lives on the page, crafted by a particularly inspired composer; there’s the stuff that…
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Family Circle Drawn Tighter by Tragedy
Child of a Turbulent Century By Victor Erlich Northwestern University Press, 240 pages, $19.95. Victor Erlich, born in 1914, was the offspring of two giants of the Jewish intellectual stage: Simon Dubnow, his grandfather, and Henryk Erlich, his father. In his new memoir, “Child of a Turbulent Century,” Erlich brings us into his heady family…
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Speaks British, Acts Yiddish
Kalooki Nights By Howard Jacobson Simon & Schuster, 464 pages, $26. Tabula rasa — meaning a blank slate, or a clean start — is, both as term and as concept, irreparably Latin, foreign and so forbidden to us, whether by God, history… or British novelist Howard Jacobson. And not just because we are “Jew Jew…
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Israeli Scholar Trains an Eye on the Emerald Isle
As a student at Tel Aviv University in the mid 1990s, Jerusalem native Guy Beiner became interested in what the French call l’histoire des mentalités, history that takes into account how a people perceived itself and its world. In particular, Beiner began to consider folklore and oral traditions — sources often ignored by historians —…
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