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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Channeling Kafka in Buenos Aires
The Ministry of Special Cases By Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages, $25. Nathan Englander’s new novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases,” begins on a dark night in a dangerous time: Jews bury themselves the way they live, crowded together, encroaching on one another’s space. The headstones were packed tight, the bodies underneath elbow…
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Novel Jews: Nathan Englander
Nathan Englander will read from “The Ministry of Special Cases” as part of Novel Jews, the downtown literary series co-sponsored by the Forward and the 14th Street Y. The Jewish Book Council also sponsors this installment. Nathan Englander’s short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and numerous anthologies, including “The Best…
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Hollywood’s War on Hate
An exhibit at the New York campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion shows Hollywood movie posters from the Holocaust era. The posters, part of lawyer Ken Sutak’s personal collection, offer a glimpse into the Hollywood of the 1930s and ’40s, revealing how the film industry independently went to war against the Nazis starting…
The Latest
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A Physician Examines His Profession’s Blind Spots
Jerome Groopman is a physician and clinical scientist at Harvard, a specialist in AIDS and cancer. He’s also a writer for The New Yorker, with a successful and thought-provoking series of books on such topics as the intersection of spirituality and medicine and the importance of a physician’s intuition. His new book “How Doctors Think”…
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The Other Disappeared
The architecture of Jewish memory has undergone explosive growth in recent years: Holocaust memorials and museums, plaques, donor walls — and works of literature, like “The Ministry of Special Cases,” Nathan Englander’s new novel about Argentina’s “disappeared,” the thousands of students, dissidents and labor leaders tortured and killed during seven years of military dictatorship. Between…
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Chinese Open New Chapter With the People of the Book
The Chinese and Jewish cultures are both great, rich civilizations. These two major societies developed highly civilized forms in ancient times and persist until today, keeping continuous recorded accounts of their origins. Each of them has had a significant impact on world history, although the two cultures seldom met. As a result, not much was…
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Jewish Noir
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union By Michael Chabon HarperCollins, 432 pages, $26.95. On January 1, 2008, sovereignty over the Federal District of Sitka, the Jewish homeland in Alaska, “a crooked parenthesis of rocky shoreline running along the western edges of Baranof and Chichagof islands,” will revert to American control. When that happens, the Sitka District Police…
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Exploring Eastern Europe, Via America and Israel
Last month, Rutgers University staged a conference devoted to examining the ways in which the Eastern European Jewish experience has been reformulated and reimagined in Israel and in the United States. Titled “Beyond Eastern Europe,” the gathering was jointly sponsored by Rutgers’s Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and the Hebrew University’s Nevzlin…
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One Man’s Persistent Empathy
Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life By Sari Nusseibeh, with Anthony David Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 pages, $27.50. One day, at the end of 1987, Sari Nusseibeh was walking out of a lecture hall at Birzeit University, just having taught his students John Locke’s concepts of liberalism and tolerance, when he was set…
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The Appeal of Alternate History
Few subgenres of literature have been subjected to such longstanding critical scorn as alternate history. Despite the occasional publication of such masterpieces as Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel, “The Man in the High Castle,” the more frequent appearance of duds like Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen’s much-maligned 1995 novel, “1945,” has reinforced alternate history’s reputation…
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Three Strangers, But Not for Long
There’s no set, no props and no intermission, yet “Rearviewmirror,” the newest offering from playwright Eric Winick, keeps audiences captivated from the moment it begins. In fact, the Reverie Productions show, playing at the 59E59 Theaters on New York City’s Upper East Side, is almost barren in its simplicity. It features just three characters —…
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