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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Spies Like Us: The Jews’ Answer to Bond
Mounted on the dashboard of my black convertible there are two plastic switches, “Grenade Launcher” and “Ejector Seat.” They amuse friends and concern wary parking lot attendants. I own high-tech gadgets ranging from a big-screen television that can do virtually everything except hover, to an IBM laptop with a Celeron processor, to the George Foreman…
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The Hidden and The Manifest
Scholars, like artists, need community — people who see the world in ways similar enough to be supportive but different enough to provoke thought, controversy and inspiration. For me, Rabbi Jill Hammer has long played all those roles. When we teach together, she always seems to “get it,” and to come up with insights or…
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Redefining What Makes A Jewish Story
On a recent fall evening, a bunch of Jews got together to tell some stories for a Chicago audience. Most of them were Jews, at any rate. Except the Palestinian. And one of the African Americans. The other African American, National Public Radio commentator Aaron Freeman, converted to Judaism years ago. If the performers sound…
The Latest
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Golem Meets ‘Taxi Driver’ in New Novel
Golem Song By Marc Estrin Unbridled Books, 320 pages, $15.95. For Rabbi Loew, the legendary maker of the original Prague-based golem, his creation was a photographic negative of the studious, passive Jew: muscular rather than atrophied; doltish rather than learned; a man of action, not of words. For Alan Krieger, antihero of Marc Estrin’s novel…
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Return of the European Jew
Being Jewish in the New Germany By Jeffrey M. Peck Rutgers University Press, 224 pages, $24.95. Turning the Kaleidoscope: Perspectives on European Jewry Edited by Sandra Lustig and Ian Leveson Berghahn Books, 288 pages, $80. In 1946, Robert Welsch, a German Jewish journalist who had fled to Palestine during World War II, went back to…
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New York Theater Teems With Jewish Fare
Looking to see a show that has a Jewish slant? Well, here’s some good news. Four off-Broadway comedies have taken the guesswork out of the selection process for you. “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy,” “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother,” “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn” and “Jewtopia” all wisely advertise…
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November 17, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward There are currently 632 kosher restaurants in New York’s downtown area alone. Among the cheapest, one can find a dinner in the range of 2 cents to 5 cents, or you can find a kosher place that will charge upwards of 40 cents for a meal. Without exception, none…
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Purim Gets a Spinal Tap
The 2007 Academy Awards are scheduled for February 25, exactly one week before Purim. Coincidence? Maybe not. If Christopher Guest’s new film, “For Your Consideration,” is any indication, Purim might be Oscar’s new favorite holiday. In “For Your Consideration,” a group of actors — earnest, skilled and well intentioned, but definitely B-list material — are…
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Arrested Development?
Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: the Art of Immaturity By Ross Posnock Princeton University Press, 328 pages, $29.95. For Americans of a certain age, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was formative: It’s by now axiomatic that most will never forget where they were at the time they received word of the shooting. Similarly, though…
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The Big Chill
Last month, in an unusual show of unity around “the fundamental principle of debate in a democracy,” some 113 scholars and intellectuals with a wide range of passionate opinions about the Middle East signed a letter to the New York Review of Books in objection to the abrupt cancellation of a planned October 3 talk…
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The Reel Deal
Annette Insdorf can hardly believe it has been 20 years since she launched her popular cinematic interview series, “Reel Pieces,” and so she is consequently in the mood to reminisce. For the Columbia University professor who is also a film scholar and a master interviewer, the occasion of her series’ anniversary offers the opportunity to…
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