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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Cooking Up A New Niche:The Chef Shot
France, as we know, is a country fiercely attached to its many traditions. Every January, Lyon — that cradle of haute cuisine spanning the vine-endowed banks of the Rhône River, home to world-famous chef Paul Bocuse — welcomes the nation’s top gastronomy fair, internationally known by its French acronym, Sirha. This past January, the city…
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Between Us Girls
Strange as it may sound, I’ve been thinking a lot about dolls this month, or, more to the point, perhaps, about girl culture in modern America. Some of my thoughts were triggered by the imperatives of academic research: I was preparing a talk on the material culture of Jewish teenage girls of the 1950s for…
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A New Book Probes Chagall’s Conflicts and Contradictions
Marc Chagall By Jonathan Wilson Schocken Books, 256 pages, $19.95. What are we supposed to do with Marc Chagall? Picasso admired him as a colorist, but, on the whole, Chagall is not remembered for his painterly technique. People know him for his subjects — for his off-kilter, dreamy takes on life in a Hasidic shtetl,…
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A Stitch in Time
Broken Threads: The Destruction of the Jewish Fashion Industry in Germany and Austria Edited by Roberta S. Kremer Berg, 136 pages, 29.95. No one can accuse Magda Goebbels of having been impervious to the damage wrought on Kristallnacht. “What a nuisance,” Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s wife said upon hearing that a clothier she favored,…
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Once Suppressed, Composers Enjoy Revival
James Conlon, music director of Los Angeles Opera, and Marilyn Ziering, a Beverly Hills philanthropist, met for the first time only a year ago, but they have become fast friends. A common interest unites them: making sure that music suppressed by the Nazis and then largely forgotten — much of it by Jewish composers —…
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A Documentary Wrings Poetry From Politics
Almost as inevitable as the endless feature stories about the recent increase in political documentaries is the limpness of the films themselves. A strong documentary demands both surprising characters and a rich ethical imagination; make subjects’ impulses too obvious, as many of these films do, and you wind up with pamphleteering, pandering or Michael Moore….
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March 2, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward Poor Annie Grossman, a young aguna, sits in her tiny room on Rivington Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, wondering what she’s going to do. One of the many bandits and charlatans that roam the Jewish quarter, preying on lonely young women, managed to swindle Annie out of $600…
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‘West Bank’ Musical Comedy Wins Oscar
“West Bank Story,” a musical comedy about the eruption of love between an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian falafel-stand worker, won this year’s Academy Award for best live short. “To be able to get this award just goes to show that there are so many people out there that support that notion that when it…
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Warhol’s Tribe
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Andy Warhol — as good a time as any to reminisce, in these pages, about the famed artist’s place in Jewish history. Although Warhol is best known for his portraits of such pop icons as Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy, in 1980 he also completed…
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Kissing and Telling
The Great Kisser By David Evanier Rager Media, Inc. 179 pages, $24.95 Though David Evanier should best be known as a writer of stories that feign to punch and kick in the upstart manner of their Chosen People, he also traffics in the ethnicities of others, having authored nonfiction volumes on singers Bobby Darin and…
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Our Dueling Playwright
This month, Theater for a New Audience, a New York City-based theater that is committed to the canon of world dramatic literature, offers a series of free staged readings of four plays concerned with the issue of Jewish otherness in western society. Three of the plays are by well-known English-language writers: Arnold Wesker (“Shylock”), A.R….
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