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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Revisiting ‘Green Pastures’
The Book of Psalms: A Translation With Commentary By Robert Alter W.W. Norton, 518 pages, $35. Robert Alter’s new edition of the Hebrew Psalms is not for everyone: It requires concentration, unfettered time and patience. Each newly translated psalm must be read through as a poem, then analyzed using the highly detailed footnotes, then reread…
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The Politics of Language
In her new book, ‘Jews and Power’ (Schocken/Nextbook), Harvard Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse discusses Jewish political adaptability through the ages. In the excerpt below, she shows how this flexibility showed itself most immediately via language. Since the inauguration of the Nobel Prizes at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews have received one-tenth of its…
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A Litvak’s Progress
In a conversation with the Forward’s Gabriel Sanders, Wisse discussed her own tale of linguistic adaptability, differing approaches to the language of the Bible and her take on Kabbalah. Gabriel Sanders: You begin your chapter with a discussion of Jewish Nobel laureates in literature and how striking their linguistic variety is. In considering your point,…
The Latest
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Much to Atone For, Munich Makes Amends
Charlotte Knobloch, president of Germany’s Jewish community and one of only about 100 surviving Munich residents who returned after World War II, used to keep a suitcase packed at all times — ready to escape should antisemitism force her out again. Of course this city, the capital of prosperous Bavaria, is both enormously wealthy and…
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Second Home
Although he never actually lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for much of his life, Isaac Bashevis Singer visited almost daily, and the neighborhood became his “second home.” The relationship between writer and geographical muse is the focus of the exhibit Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side, a series of nearly 40 images…
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Passing Before the Divine Eye
In last week’s column on the Yiddish expression bobbe mayseh, we saw how folk etymologies, which explain rare or puzzling words by changing or relating them to words understood by everyone, may come into being when the original meanings of words are forgotten. An interesting example of this phenomenon in Jewish tradition involves the Rosh…
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Yid Vid: Happy New Year!
Why he shares a garage with a Hasid, I cannot say.
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Yid Vid: Chicago’s Black Israelites
Here’s an incredibly interesting look at Rabbi Capers Funnye and Chicago’s Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. Hat tip: Arieh Lebowitz
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September 7, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Two Jews were killed and more than 40 were wounded in a pogrom that took place in Brooklyn, where Jews are comparing events to what happens regularly in tsarist Russia. The attacks took place on a block in Brownsville, where there is a two-week-old strike in place at the…
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Film & TV Leni Online
Back in May, our Gabriel Sanders interviewed Leni Riefenstahl biographer Steven Bach at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. The interview has since been broadcast on C-Span and is now available online. The broadcast includes a short excerpt from the filmmaker’s 1938 documentary “Olympia” and — at the tail end — a question from Gabriel’s…
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Pissarro’s Unquiet Pastoral
This fall, the Jewish Museum of New York is mounting its first show dedicated to Camille Pissarro, who founded the Impressionist movement and is its only Jewish artist. The museum’s previous showcases of his work, in 1995 and 1997, were significant events — the former an international retrospective said to be the first major exhibition…
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Culture ‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
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Books In ‘Something We Said,’ Richard Pryor’s daughter finds words to discuss the unspeakable
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Opinion It’s time for Jews who love Israel to give up on Zionism
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Opinion Cultural boycotts of Israel just reached peak absurdity
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