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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How Dunkirk Saved the Jews
Each time the anniversary of the evacuation from Dunkirk and the fall of France comes round, more paeans of praise are written about the “miraculous” escape. But those eulogizing both the bravery on the beaches and the men who manned those celebrated little ships rarely stop to mention the consequences that would have followed if…
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A Triumvirate of Evil
If Roman Polanski’s 2005 cinematic adaptation of “Oliver Twist” and Al Pacino’s performance as Shylock in the recent film “The Merchant of Venice” have not satisfied your cravings for Jewish malefactors, you’ll be delighted to hear that Theater for a New Audience is about to present us with a jam-packed program devoted to the upper…
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Leopold Bloom’s Brothers
Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History By Cormac Ó. Gráda Princeton University Press, 320 pages, $35. My Irish Catholic grandmother fulfilled a life-long goal in her 80s when she traveled to the Holy Land; however, the story she told on her return was not of the sights she’d seen. Wandering around…
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Jewish Punks Unite
To commence each show on the Eight Crazy Nights tour, a flame was colored in above the menorah drawn on a bass drum. The drum set was then shared by three Jewish-oriented punk bands that joined forces to celebrate Hanukkah in West Coast punk venues. The tour featured a magical world where Manischewitz wine flows…
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Looking Back December 22, 2006
100 Years Ago In the Forward As more than 50 workers looked on, 25-year-old Louise Segal murdered the foreman in Louise Fink’s Bookbinding Shop. While initial police inquiries into these events indicated that the murder was the result of a love triangle gone bad, this theory turned out to be false. Apparently, Segal was working…
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Double Vision
Does a scholar’s theory render moot the debate about a play’s antisemitism? Shylock is Shakespeare By Kenneth Gross University of Chicago Press, 184 pages, $22.50 Sometimes, when the traditional tools of the trade just don’t cut it, a scholar is forced to get creative. In the closing pages of “Freud’s Moses,” a 1991 study of…
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Rattling the Chains Of American Poetry
Girly Man By Charles Bernstein University of Chicago Press, 186 pages, $24. In the late 1970s, when I was studying creative writing at a fancy Eastern college, I spent a good deal of my time worrying about “finding my voice.” Like most of my friends, I dreamed of achieving a sincere and brandable style, one…
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The Israel Philharmonic Turns 70
The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is older than the State of Israel. It was the brainchild of famous Polish-born, Vienna-based violinist Bronislaw Huberman. A perspicacious virtuoso, Huberman persuaded about 75 musicians from major European orchestras to make a bee-line to Palestine. It wasn’t out of fear of impending danger; it was just a nice cultural idea…
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Buenos Aires Blues
‘Family Law,” Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman’s latest offering, is a movie about lawyers, so almost by necessity the issue of secrets and lies predominates. Only here, the prevarications are of a domestic sort: Ariel Perelmen, a young professor of law, son of Bernardo Perelman, a Buenos Aires criminal attorney, keeps secrets from his wife, Sandra….
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One of Vilna’s Own Trains a Lens on the City
‘As a young girl I took it for granted I would go to university and be a professional, that I would be an artist and a doctor!” exclaimed septuagenarian Mira Jedwabnik Van Doren. Though she’s at an age when most start slowing down, the Vilna-born artist seems to be doing anything but: She has just…
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Seeking Compensation for Tragedy
Confronting the Perpetrators: A History of the Claims Conference By Marilyn Henry Vallentine Mitchell, 256 pages, $35. Since 1952, more than 500,000 Jewish victims of Nazism have received compensation from Germany. As imperfect as the term “compensation” sounds in this case, no payment ever would have been made to survivors without the relentless and dedicated…
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