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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Parsing the Messy Terrain of the Heart
Through his myriad publications in journals and magazines, one nonfiction best-seller and three books of fiction, Steve Almond has created a distinctive voice and literary persona. Pleasure-obsessed, self-deprecating, horny, hilarious and always dedicated to parsing the messy terrain of the human heart, his projects have always felt intensely — and refreshingly — personal. In his…
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Trembling Toward Icon Status
During the upcoming 10 days reserved on the Jewish calendar for reflection, Amos Lassen, an observant Jew living in the heart of the Bible Belt, will host an event at his Little Rock, Ark., synagogue that might inject a little shock into the Days of Awe. Lassen will be giving the Arkansas capital its first…
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Sweet Home Lithuania
Some bands spend months, even years, practicing before their members perform together — let alone record an album. Not so with The Lithuanian Empire, an eight-piece klezmer-fusion outfit that spent no more than a month practicing before recording its first, self-titled album. Although the band’s geographically diverse membership has resulted in a frustrating scarcity of…
The Latest
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West Side Storied
Exactly half a century ago, lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II went to Washington, D.C., to attend the staging of a new musical that was slated to open in New York. He knew that nothing remotely like this production had ever reached Broadway. Until September 1957, its stages had not normally presented teenage hoodlums embroiled…
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The Cantakerous, Compelling Musings of Poet Bert Meyers
In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems by Bert Meyers, edited by Daniel Meyers University of New Mexico Press, 295 pages, $24.95. Bert Meyers is what some might call “a poet from the bones.” Meyers, a lyric poet, a proletarian poet, a poet who deplored any and all attempts to categorize a poet, creates work that…
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‘Bubbe Maseh’
Michael Epstein from Milford, N.J., writes: “At a recent Yiddish club meeting, I heard that the expression ‘bubbe maseh’ has nothing to do with a bubbe or grandmother, but has its origins in the name of a medieval knight. Can you shed any light on this?” I’ll be glad to, starting with the observation that…
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August 31, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward Recently, Jacob S. Heilprin lived in a palace on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Even his wife drove around town in her own automobile. These days, Heilprin finds himself without a job and without a penny to his name. He appeared this week in a Federal Court to declare bankruptcy….
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Music Punk Is Dead
First, legendary New York punk palace C.B.G.B. passed into history. Now, the man who made the club a center of the burgeoning punk scene has passed away: Hilly (Hillel) Kristal, R.I.P.
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Barbarians at the Gate
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story By Diane Ackerman W.W. Norton & Company, 288 pages, $23.95. In 1935, the Warsaw Zoo was an Edenic haven in the urban center. Small deer and peacocks wandered freely along gravel pathways, past lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos, hippos and other creatures enclosed in areas designed to resemble natural habitats….
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Topical Solutions
Lost Between the Edges By Eldon Garnet Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 240 pages, $14.95. Outcast By Shimon Ballas Translated from the Hebrew by Ammiel Alcalay and Oz Shelach City Lights Publishers, 210 pages, $13.95. The moment a newspaper headline is made, writers of ambition break ranks with journalism and come to attention with books, ostensibly products of…
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Amazing Grace
Those of us of a certain generation can remember exactly where we were sitting, or standing, or lying, when we read the opening lines of Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice”: “There is a certain place where dumbwaiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother’s mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate…
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