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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The Mongrel’s Lament
In late 2001, an attacked America prepares once again to defend a free world, mainland Europe mires in decadence and, in Alessandro Piperno’s debut novel, “The Worst Intentions”(Europa Editions), Daniel Sonnino makes a youthful attempt to reconcile the peoples of his past: Jewish, Catholic, Italian. Born of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Sonnino…
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New Restitution Claim Emerges in Sweden
Sweden’s museum of modern art is facing its first claim for Nazi-era displaced art: an Emil Nolde painting that went missing when a Frankfurt businessman tried to ship his artworks from Germany in 1939. The government recently decided that the Moderna Museet in Stockholm must resolve the claim for the painting it bought 40 years…
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The Outsiders
Few great writers have been as lionized and as vilified as Oscar Wilde. An Irishman who sought to be embraced by English society, he quickly became one of England’s most in-demand celebrities and one of the world’s most-produced and most-translated writers, only to be sentenced to prison for homosexuality — or, more correctly, bisexuality —…
The Latest
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‘The Ethiopian Jews of Israel’
‘The Ethiopian Jews of Israel: Personal Stories of Life in the Promised Land” (Jewish Lights Publishing), a new book of interviews conducted by Len Lyons and containing photographs by Ilan Ossendryver, explores the complexities of the modern Ethiopian-Israeli experience. For years, thousands of Ethiopians waited to be airlifted to a land of milk and honey,…
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July 20, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward Frieda Singer, a young mother, was arrested along with two of her friends, Adele Finkelstein and Anna Segal. The three ladies were stopped from sitting with their babies on the grass in Mount Morris Park, in the Harlem section of Manhattan. Police first arrested Singer, who refused to vacate…
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A Legend Looks Back: A Visit With Kirk Douglas
Los Angeles – Over the course of an illustrious Hollywood career spanning more than five decades, Kirk Douglas has played many parts: Vincent Van Gogh, Spartacus and boxer Midge Kelly, to name just a formidable few. But the one character he has never played — to his deep regret, he now says — was that…
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Comic Artist Remembers, Sort of
Stop Forgetting To Remember: The Autobiography of Walter Kurtz By Peter Kuper Crown, 208 pages, $19.95. Every Forward reader, it is safe to say, knows Ben Katchor’s work, and almost as many would recognize the contributions of Art Spiegelman. Since the 2000 publication of Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” the in-house…
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In the Presence of Genius
New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) By David Shapiro The Overlook Press, 240 pages, $21.95. What is there to say? Prodigious, brilliant, David Shapiro has lived in many worlds of art, including music and painting. Shapiro is also the author of four books of criticism: on poet John Ashbery, and on artists Jim Dine, Jasper Johns…
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Who’s Your Daddy?
l Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel By Theodore W. Jennings Jr. Continuum, 288 pages, $26.95. For most people, what the Bible says about homosexuality begins and ends with two verses in Leviticus. What those verses mean is subject to interpretation, of course. Some people see them as a blanket prohibition…
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Upside-Down Coffee
Adam Chanes of New York City, who at age 11 is probably the youngest person ever to address a query to this column, recently returned from a vacation in Israel with his parents. While he was there he asked me why, when Israelis order coffee in a café, they often ask for kaffei hafukh, which…
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Norman Mailer, Auteur
There is quixotic, and then there is Norman Mailer: the author of numerous best-selling loose, baggy monsters that tackle every important issue and icon of the 20th century, but also a guy who stabbed his second wife (out of six) with a penknife at a party, head-butted Gore Vidal in response to a suggestion that…
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