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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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…
The Latest
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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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The Raging Bronx Bull of German Journalism
When Berlin’s largest opera house, Deutsche Oper, canceled four performances of a modernized version of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” — which included images of the severed heads of Jesus, Buddha, Poseidon and the Prophet Muhammad — because of the possibility of a fundamentalist Islamic attack brought on by a perceived denigration of Muhammad, journalist Henryk Broder went…
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In the News Again, Tuberculosis Victims Have History of Seeking Cures Far and Wide
My work usually doesn’t take me too far away from home, but last month, as it happened, I found myself in Denver, where, as a guest of the Rocky Mountain Princeton Alumni Association, I had come to give a speech. Wined and dined by those “Tigers” who now call the “Mile High City” and its…
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Using Survivor Testimony, a Scholar Fills in France’s Holocaust Story
Holocaust Odysseys: The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vesubie and Their Flight Through France and Italy By Susan Zuccotti Yale University Press, 288 pages, $28. When it comes to Holocaust history, France gets short shrift. This is not to say that we don’t know anything about the Jewish experience in France during World War II, it’s just that…
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Defending Ladino
In response to my May 11 column on Ladino, Rachel Bortnick, who identifies herself as “a native Ladino speaker and an activist for the preservation and appreciation of that precious Jewish language,” has written a lengthy letter to protest my statement that “the Jewish texture of Ladino isn’t quite as rich or as thick” as…
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The Price of Milk and Honey
Among the chosen with whom, in biblical times, the Lord had conversations, Moses was special. “Your brother,” God says to the rebellious Miriam in Numbers, Chapter 12, “is a familiar within my household. With him I speak not in riddles but mouth to mouth.” In one of these conversations not recorded in any chapter, the…
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Coolness is Overrated
Let’s face it: Paul Simon, who was awarded the first George and Ira Gershwin Prize for Popular Song and was feted with a gala concert in Washington, D.C., on May 23, was never really hip. He was always just a bit too sincere, a bit too dorky, and that’s probably why his music — which…
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