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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Cold Mount Sinai
Landsman By Peter Charles Melman Counterpoint, 320 pages, $24.95. Few chapters of American history have inspired as many novelists as the Civil War. If, as the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has said, it is our “Iliad,” then we’ve been graced with not one, but hundreds of Homers. What America has been without is an Isaac…
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South vs. North
Historians of Southern Jewish culture fit roughly into two camps: those who believe that the Jewish experience in the South was fundamentally different from the Jewish experience in the North, and those who argue that similarities overwhelm differences. The Forward interviewed one representative from each camp. Mark I. Greenberg, co-editor of “Jewish Roots in Southern…
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How One City Gal Found Faith — and Herself
Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou By Jennifer Anne Moses University of Wisconsin Press, 176 pages, $26.95 With candor, poignancy and a hint of neurosis, writer Jennifer Anne Moses recounts the past 12 years of her life in Louisiana in her new memoir, “Bagels and Grits.” The product of a privileged Washington, D.C.,…
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Exploring an Atlanta Tragedy
In April 1913, 14-year-old Mary Phagan was found raped and murdered in the basement of an Atlanta pencil factory. The police botched the initial forensic investigation and were casting about for leads when suspicion fell upon the Jewish factory manager, Leo Frank. Local journalists, who practiced Hearst-style yellow journalism, sensationalized the ensuing trial. A mob…
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Gematria and the Ouroboros
Marc G. Schramm writes: “I read recently that there is a relationship between the Hebrew letter Chet (gematria of 8) and the ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. The latter is a double zero, ‘the head and the body, the Moebius strip of the soul. It is the sideways sign of infinity.’ “Can…
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The Tribe in Texas
Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas Compiled and edited by Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth D. Roseman Brandeis University Press, 332 pages, $34.95. New York City has long been the focus of American Jewish history. In recent years, however, acclaimed works by such scholars as Deborah Dash Moore and Eva Morawska have begun…
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June 8, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Anyone who has spent time in lower Manhattan’s Essex Market Courthouse knows that the door to the building’s jail gets closed as 4 p.m. sharp. So when the judge sentenced Max Rothstein, an umbrella peddler under arrest for peddling without a license, to a $1 fine and a night…
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Film & TV ‘Munich’ Gets ‘Knocked Up’
When it was released in December 2005, Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” — the story of the Israeli agents tasked with assassinating those responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre — was criticized in some corners of the Jewish world for what was seen as lily-livered progressivism or, worse, downright hostility to Israel. The New Republic’s Leon…
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Boy, Interrupted
In the hands of the wrong filmmakers, child protagonists can easily pull the audience into a world too nostalgic, too sweet. They move through magic worlds, purportedly enchanting us along the way. Thankfully, in “The Year My Parents Went on Vacation,” Mauro, the 12-year-old protagonist, does no such thing. In fact, it is this child’s…
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Writing the Unpaintable
Conscious/Unconscious By Michael Hafftka Six Gallery Press, 184 pages, $18. There are three distinct, echoing voices in Michael Hafftka’s newly issued book: a writer, a visual artist and a son of Holocaust survivors. Understandably, this trio makes for a complex, even conflicted, aesthetic. And indeed, “Conscious/Unconscious,” interspersing 27 of Hafftka’s drawings with 56 rambling, phantasmagoric…
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Paretsky Unspools a New Mystery: Her Own
Writing In An Age Of Silence By Sara Paretsky Verso, 158 pages, $22.95. Decades before she developed the literary alter ego for which she is best known — the female private investigator V.I. Warshawski — mystery writer Sara Paretsky was already experimenting with fictional personas, fictional masks. As one of the few Jewish girls growing…
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