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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May 4, 2007
100 Years Ago int the forward New York City License Commissioner John Bogart is warning Lower East Siders to be on the lookout for a scam artist known to the police as “Davidovich.” The scammer has been placing advertisements in Yiddish papers, offering a percentage of his successful employment agency. He brings potential investors to…
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After a 150-Year Intermission, Biblical-Themed Opera Reappears in Russia
The birth of Giuseppe Verdi’s third opera, “Nabucco,” came about almost by accident. In 1841, the 28-year-old Verdi, paralyzed by depression following the death of his wife and children, and the failure of his second opera, vowed never to compose again. Receiving a libretto from Bartolomeo Merelli, the impresario of Milan’s La Scala Theater, Verdi…
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Breaking The Silence Of Sefirah –– Sort of
The hip-hop artist Kosha Dillz recently scheduled a stop on his Midwest tour at Mike’s Place, a monthly party in Chicago. It seemed like a great match: Mike’s Place — which caters to young, single Jews in their 20s and 30s — is held at a club in Lakeview, an up-and-coming Modern Orthodox community that…
The Latest
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An Offering To the Priests Of Yiddish
The Cross and Other Jewish Stories Lamed Shapiro Yale University Press, 226 pages, $30. At the end of “White Challah,” one of 16 stories included in Lamed Shapiro’s posthumous and definitive “The Cross, and Other Jewish Stories,” the aftermath of a pogrom is described in the following manner: “Pillars of smoke and pillars of flame…
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Jewish Jesus Conference Asks, ‘Who Invited You?’
This past Sunday, the Web-based culture organization Nextbook sponsored a daylong New York conference devoted to a subject not often explored in Jewish circles: the life and legacy of Jesus Christ. The novelty of the choice came through already in the program’s impish title: “What’s He Doing Here? Jesus in Jewish Culture.” Sure, Jesus was…
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Kosher Tech
A few months back, one of my columns explored the ways in which the introduction of electricity in late-19th- and early-20th-century America affected religious ritual — unquestionably for the better. The impact of the very latest technology, from the Internet to third-generation cell phones, on American Jewish life of the 21st-century appears to be far…
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More Arms Than Shiva
The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein By Martin Duberman Alfred A. Knopf, 736 pages, $37.50. Barely a quarter of the way through “The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein,” Martin Duberman’s voluminous new biography of the arts patron who, through his partnership with choreographer George Balanchine, transformed American ballet, the subject has undertaken — with varying degrees of…
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Sopranos Chat: Tony Feuds With His Favorite Jew
Last year Forward.com editor Ami Eden wrote an essay arguing that mob boss Tony Soprano had a thick philosemitic streak inspired by a Jewish associate, Herman “Hesh” Rabkin. Did last week’s episode — with a Tony-Hesh feud — ruin the theory? Click here to hear from Eden and Forward associate editor Gabriel Sanders on the…
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The Mob From Zion
Blood & Volume: Inside New York’s Israeli Mafia By Dave Copeland Barricade Books, 288 pages, $24.95. A decade before Tony and Carmela Soprano started bickering in New Jersey, a high-level cocaine dealer called Ron Gonen and his wife, Honey, were at each other’s throats in a Long Island mock-Tudor with three bedrooms and a two-car…
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April 27, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward In honor of its 10th anniversary, poet Morris Rosenfeld writes a paean to his favorite newspaper. The final stanzas read: After these ten years I still see Pharaoh’s power/I still see the Inquisition/I still can hear the devil laugh/With his bloody ambition/But I also hear you for ten hard…
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Paul Mazursky: Middle-class Champion
Every faith needs its defender, and no other filmmaker has championed middle-class mediocrity with the religious zeal of Paul Mazursky. Often mistaken for a liberal humanist, Mazursky habitually drops his bourgeois characters into a countercultural fishbowl and then celebrates their inevitable efforts to come up for air. His is the most ideologically conservative body of…
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