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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Time To Bring the Forward Back Home
If you stand at the lower Manhattan corner of East Broadway and Essex on just about any spring weekend, you’ll see tour guides leading groups around the neighborhood. They follow different routes, but all come to East Broadway at some point. Once the intellectual center of immigrant Jewish life, the street still hosts a number…
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Singer, Sung
Years ago, the director of the Hebrew school where I briefly taught in Portland, Ore., offered to introduce me to a composer she knew at Reed College. For a variety of reasons — most having to do with sloth and misanthropy — I never pursued the connection. I’ve regretted it ever since. The guy my…
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Judging Aharon
Last March, when the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists decided to give its 2007 Pursuit of Justice Award to Aharon Barak, the recently retired chief judge of the Israeli Supreme Court, they chose a surprising colleague to present the honor: Antonin Scalia. The ceremony was held in the august interior of the Supreme…
The Latest
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A 94-Foot Retelling of Jewish History
Throughout her career, artist Ruth Weisberg has preferred to make art in series, wrestling with subjects and producing multiple works that are thematically, formally and sometimes physically connected. A frequent theme is redemption — especially how a moral or physical danger or horror can transform into a redemptive act for those involved, and for those…
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Portrait of the Artist As a Nice Jewish Boy
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952 By Allen Ginsberg Edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan Da Capo Press, 416 pages, $27.50. Somewhere along the line, Allen Ginsberg changed American poetry — even American culture. Conventional wisdom says it happened the night of October 7, 1955, when Ginsberg performed his…
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In Seventh Heaven
Forward reader Nochum Elek inquires: “I would like to know whether the Yiddish expression in zibnten himl [in seventh heaven] is a translation from the English, or whether it is the other way around and the English ‘seventh heaven’ comes from the one mentioned in the tractate of Hagigah in the Talmud, where it says:…
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Film & TV Daniel Pearl’s Father Laments ‘Moral Equivalence’ of ‘A Mighty Heart’
The father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is criticizing “A Mighty Heart,” the new movie about his son’s abduction, suggesting that it falls into the trap of “moral equivalence.” In an article for The New Republic Online, Judea Pearl writes: You can see traces of this logic in the film’s comparison of…
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The Power of Unpretty Poetry
Bob Perelman’s poetry — 16 books in the past three decades — can be explained by what it does not do. Perelman, who came of age in the late 1960s, has always reacted strongly to what he saw as the reigning aesthetic of the time: a cult of individual voice where the poet was something…
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Master Blend
Canadian-born musician Josh Dolgin, aka DJ Socalled, is reviving the centuries-old Jewish tradition of klezmer music the only way he knows how: by mixing it with obscure samples, superior beats, bilingual rap and the occasional reference to his “ding-a-ling.” Dolgin has inspired his fair share of skeptics — people who disapprove of pairing traditional klezmer…
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Place and Time: When History Becomes an Asset
Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but so, too, does architecture. I refer here to those buildings that survive the passage of time and the ups and downs of their respective neighborhoods only to be turned into something else: factories into condos, warehouses into restaurants. In this instance, what pleases the eye and tickles the imagination…
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Plucking the Strings of Tragedy
The Savior By Eugene Drucker Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $23. To write a novel about the Holocaust is to enter, willingly, into precarious territory. What at first seems like a rich mine for inspiration is a subject seemingly ever present in contemporary literature of a certain sort, yet ever impossible to label cliché. Authentic…
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Antisemitism Decoded Abe Foxman built the Jewish establishment. He died troubled by what it had become