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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Hunting in Zimbabwe For Identity And Family
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun By Peter Godwin Little, Brown and Company, 352 pages, $24.99. Last August, I visited an elderly Jewish couple at their spacious apartment in an affluent neighborhood in Johannesburg, South Africa. A distant family friend had referred to them as people who would welcome the opportunity to take me out…
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Everything I Know About Being Bad I Learned in Hebrew School
Once upon a time, I thought a quintessential feature of being Jewish involved asking questions. But I learned early on that challenging the Modern Orthodox rules of my upbringing meant I would be considered a rebel and a troublemaker. Maybe I was born into the wrong tribe, or at least the wrong family, but 613…
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Bridge to Bukhara
On an auspicious day in the late 1980s, New York-based photographer Joan Roth decided to visit Bukhara in the former Soviet Union to photograph the centuries-old Jewish community there. The community’s relative isolation from the greater Jewish world and their constant and historic struggle against Muslim oppression had resulted in a unique set of traditions:…
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Ravensbruck’s Famous Survivor
Fiorello’s Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck’s Story Edited by Rochelle G. Saidel By Gemma La Guardia Gluck Syracuse University Press, 184 pages, $16.95. Back in the 1980s, a number of Holocaust scholars and “people who should know better” told historian Rochelle Saidel that Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp located about 60 miles north of Berlin,…
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Judeo-English, Part II
Last week’s column, which started with an e-mail from Irving Treitel that despaired of the possibility of a distinct American Jewish language, ended with the question of whether, considered lexically, phonetically and grammatically, there actually is already such a thing as “Judeo-English” in the sense that there were once dialects of “Judeo-Italian,” “Judeo-Arabic,” etc. With…
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Books Worst… Book Title… Ever
Wondering what the book’s about? Fortunately, there’s this informative back-cover testimonial from Stanford literature professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Reading the texts of a culture that could only achieve its Germanness by being so utterly Jewish, along the lines of the 20th-century’s terminal mass migrations, Todd Presner’s book opens our 21st-century eyes to a new way…
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June 22, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Jacob Radin (nee Nokhem Radovski), a 35-year-old seltzer delivery man, was murdered this week while driving on his route in the Harlem area of New York City. As Radin was driving his truck Wednesday night, two crooks stole two cases of seltzer from it. Radin went looking around the…
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Music Woody Returns to L.A., Culture in Tow
Woody Allen will make his operatic debut in September 2008, directing Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” at the Los Angeles Opera. It’s hard to imagine Allen feeling at home in the City of Angels (in “Annie Hall” he perfected the role of fish-out-of-water New Yorker in L.A., famously saying, “I don’t want to move to a city…
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Rescuing Drohobych
Rubin Schmer is an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor with cancer, but right now he’s not thinking of his past or his future. What’s on his mind is the fate of the Jewish cemetery, the mass gravesite and synagogue in his native town of Drohobycz (now Drohobych, Ukraine). For the past three years, Schmer has been single-minded…
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The People’s Bible
Joseph’s Bones: Understanding the Struggle Between God and Mankind in the Bible By Jerome M. Segal Riverhead Books, 308 pages, $24.95. ‘Let us make mankind in our image”: God’s pluralis majestatis declaration at the beginning of Genesis surely stands as one of the great historical inversions of human literature. Since the dawn of time, human…
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Beat This
Doing 70 By Hettie Jones Hanging Loose Press, 92 pages, $15. It is hard to talk about Hettie Jones’s poetry without mentioning her biography. Born Hettie Cohen in 1934, brought up in a middle-class section of Queens, she decamped to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in the mid-1950s. There she met and married the young black poet…
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