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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Using Survivor Testimony, a Scholar Fills in France’s Holocaust Story
Holocaust Odysseys: The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vesubie and Their Flight Through France and Italy By Susan Zuccotti Yale University Press, 288 pages, $28. When it comes to Holocaust history, France gets short shrift. This is not to say that we don’t know anything about the Jewish experience in France during World War II, it’s just that…
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Defending Ladino
In response to my May 11 column on Ladino, Rachel Bortnick, who identifies herself as “a native Ladino speaker and an activist for the preservation and appreciation of that precious Jewish language,” has written a lengthy letter to protest my statement that “the Jewish texture of Ladino isn’t quite as rich or as thick” as…
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The Price of Milk and Honey
Among the chosen with whom, in biblical times, the Lord had conversations, Moses was special. “Your brother,” God says to the rebellious Miriam in Numbers, Chapter 12, “is a familiar within my household. With him I speak not in riddles but mouth to mouth.” In one of these conversations not recorded in any chapter, the…
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Coolness is Overrated
Let’s face it: Paul Simon, who was awarded the first George and Ira Gershwin Prize for Popular Song and was feted with a gala concert in Washington, D.C., on May 23, was never really hip. He was always just a bit too sincere, a bit too dorky, and that’s probably why his music — which…
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Film & TV Borat in Rehab, Eva Mendes’s Jew Fetish and Other Tales From the MTV Movie Awards
For one night, at least, MTV may as well have been the Jewish Television Network. Yesterday’s MTV Movie Awards had an unusually large number of young, hip celebrity Jews taking center-stage. The show was hosted by comedian-of-the-moment Sarah Silverman, who, in typical faux-innocent fashion, mercilessly roasted Paris Hilton (conveniently in attendance). Silverman noted — to…
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Jewish Mother, R.I.P.
The Jewish Mother, one of the most dominating icons of 20th-century American popular culture, has died. News of her death was released, inadvertently, by Brandeis University history professor Joyce Antler in “You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother.” Mother — also known as MA!!!!! — was 90 years old, give…
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Six Days, 40 Years of Controversy
The weeks following the Six Day War found Israelis not sure if they were awake or dreaming. Everyone spoke of miracles, of the supernatural forces that had guided the Jewish army to such overwhelming victory. The names of the generals — Rabin, Hod, Sharon, Peled — resounded like the names of gods. The people once…
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A Forgotten Writer’s Paradise Of Prose and Poetry
From Man to Man By Moishe Nadir Translated by Harvey Fink Windshift Press, 130 pages, $16.95. Before we begin to speak of the revolutionary work of Yiddish American writer Moishe Nadir, we should first speak of the revolution in publishing technology and arts economics that has finally allowed a translated volume of his to be…
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A Mighty Pen and a Humble Heart
In 1997, Saul Friedländer, a historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, published the first half of his chef-d’oeuvre, “Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939.” Writing in The New York Times Book Review, historian Fritz Stern praised the book for being at once evocative and rigorous. “He writes history with…
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Dramatizing the History of Indian Jews
Dropped From Heaven By Sophie Judah Schocken Books, 243 pages, $23. Members of the Bene Israel, the ancient Indian Jewish community, claim they are the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, that they escaped persecution in the Galilee in the second-century BCE, and that their ancestors were shipwrecked on the southern coast of…
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At 96, A Writer Is Born
Dropped From Heaven By Sophie Judah Schocken Books, 243 pages, $23. Walls and barriers have made front-page news lately. There’s the concrete wall going up between Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the reinforced fence along the United States-Mexico border. These recent developments make Harry Bernstein’s memoir, “The Invisible Wall,” especially pertinent. Bernstein, now 96…
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