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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Judeo-English
Irving Treitel writes: “Your May 11 column about Ladino and other Jewish languages was interesting. However, when I turn to the Encyclopedia Judaica, I become depressed. Apart from Yiddish and Ladino, I find listed under the letter ‘J’ Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Tat, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Provençal, and Judeo-Greek. The one language that is missing is Judeo-English. “As…
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June 15, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Two Yiddish-speaking robbers wearing masks and phony beards broke into Celia Weinstrom’s apartment, on Eldridge Street in Manhattan. They tied up the young housekeeper, stuffed a rag in her mouth so she couldn’t scream and blindfolded her. They demanded to know where she kept her money. When she refused…
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Burning the Ones You Love
The Archivist’s Story By Travis Holland The Dial Press, 256 pages, $23. How does a lover of great literature survive in an era in which writers are persecuted and manuscripts are burned? And what if that same person were forced to destroy the manuscripts of the great writers he venerates? This is the dilemma faced…
The Latest
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Peering Inside A Jewel Box Of Judaica
Walking down the leafy side streets of Philadelphia’s Center City, one could easily pass the Rosenbach Museum & Library amid a row of elegant townhouses. But it is a cultural jewel box, with more than 30,000 books and 300,000 pages of manuscripts amassed by legendary dealer Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach, as well as 18th- and…
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A Catalog of Defiance
Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust Edited by David Engel, Eva Fogelman, et al. Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 146 pages, $22.95. ‘Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust,” a catalog published to accompany an exhibition of the same title that recently opened at New York’s…
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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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