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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Speaks British, Acts Yiddish
Kalooki Nights By Howard Jacobson Simon & Schuster, 464 pages, $26. Tabula rasa — meaning a blank slate, or a clean start — is, both as term and as concept, irreparably Latin, foreign and so forbidden to us, whether by God, history… or British novelist Howard Jacobson. And not just because we are “Jew Jew…
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Israeli Scholar Trains an Eye on the Emerald Isle
As a student at Tel Aviv University in the mid 1990s, Jerusalem native Guy Beiner became interested in what the French call l’histoire des mentalités, history that takes into account how a people perceived itself and its world. In particular, Beiner began to consider folklore and oral traditions — sources often ignored by historians —…
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A Chat With Tamar Yellin, Winner of New Fiction Prize
Last week, the Jewish Book Council announced that Tamar Yellin, author of “The Genizah at the House of Shepher” (Toby Press, 2005), is the first recipient of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Rohr, who currently lives in Miami, spent his early years in Europe before moving to Bogotá, Colombia, where he made…
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‘Inheritance’
‘The rich are different than you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald reportedly told Ernest Hemingway. “Yes, they have more money,” Hemingway quipped. It’s a telling, if apocryphal, exchange that delineates two basic understandings of wealth — one aristocratic, the other democratic. In her first book of photographs, “Inheritance” (The Monacelli Press), Andrea Stern advances Hemingway’s…
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March 30, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward There are currently dozens, possibly hundreds, of Jews stuck on Ellis Island for a variety of reasons: In most cases, either their children are too sick to enter the country or they’re awaiting the arrival of their relatives. These poor Jews, sentenced to an indeterminate amount of time on…
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The real Leni Riefenstahl
Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl By Steven Bach Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages, $30. Leni Riefenstahl’s 1987 autobiography begins with an epigraph borrowed from Albert Einstein: “So many things have been written about me, masses of insolent lies and inventions.” Apparently, the woman best known as “Hitler’s filmmaker” had no misgivings about…
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The Greatest Shoah on Earth
My Holocaust By Tova Reich HarperCollins, 336 pages, $24.95. Of all the hucksters, fakers, phonies and wannabes to have been spawned by the so-called “Shoah business,” few can hold a (yahrzeit) candle to Maurice Messer, the fumbling, stumbling, malapropism-spewing figure at the heart of Tova Reich’s deliciously wicked satirical novel “My Holocaust.” A wheeler-dealer, schnorrer,…
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St. Petersburg On the Hudson
There is a profile of the kind of person behind today’s booming Russian art market, and Boris Stavrovski does not fit it. He is neither nouveau riche nor an oligarch. He is a computer science professor at the City University of New York who houses one of the largest and most intriguing collections of modern…
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Jonathan Safran Foer To Release English Version of Haggadah
Jonathan Safran Foer will be releasing a new English version of the Passover Haggadah, the best-selling novelist recently confirmed, speaking to a packed German audience at the American Academy in Berlin’s lakeside villa on the outskirts of the capital. With more than 4,000 known versions of the book once or currently existing, the Haggadah—which tells…
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The Last Word
Joseph Friedenson is anxious. A deadline is approaching, and he’s got to put the next edition of Dos Yiddishe Vort to bed. Never mind that he hasn’t missed a deadline — in 54 years. He’s still worried. Then again, he doesn’t have much help. Friedenson, whom I know as Uncle Yossel, has been editing this…
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Why ‘Sammy’ Won’t Run — At Least Not on Film
Although Hollywood has changed plenty since Budd Schulberg’s fictionalized exposé “What Makes Sammy Run?” first hit stands in 1941, the novel’s pioneering take on the lure of money and power remains timeless. The story’s inimitable antihero, Sammy Glick, reacts against his lower-class Jewish upbringing to become an amoral hustler who cons his way into running…
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