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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Easy Reading for the Serious Music Set
Overture By Yael Goldstein Doubleday, 304 pages, $24.95. Golden-brown and beautiful, curvy in all the right places: a generous bottom, a bounteous top; the waist nicely pinched. Her measurements: 355 millimeters for the length of her back, 130 millimeters for the length of her neck. Ebony and ivory. What a body. And that’s just the…
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Leonard Cohen: Poet of the Holy Sinners
Book of Longing By Leonard Cohen Ecco Press, 240 pages, $24.95. Leonard Cohen has long been a poet of the sacred and profane. Like his fellow Jewish pop troubadours, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, Cohen has, for 50 years now, written and sung about love, God, temptation and sex — though arguably to greater extremes…
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A Distant Sound Now Nearer
Of the “degenerate Jews” whose work and lives were erased in the Nazi deluge, one of the most remarkable is Franz Schreker. He is also among the least known. Yet in the early years of the Weimar republic, Schreker was the most important German opera composer — in his heyday more highly regarded than Richard…
The Latest
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April 20, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Jewish workers! It has already been three weeks that a bitter battle has been waged between bosses and striking workers in our neighborhood. On one side stand a few dozen reefer manufacturers — newly hatched little capitalists, they are, who have united in a bosses association. And on the…
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A Theater Stages New Show – and Controversy
Even before the first performance of “Last Jew in Europe,” the Jewish Theater of New York’s play penned by Tuvia Tenenbom, the show already had people up in arms. Citing the tragicomedy’s use of photographs of antisemitic graffiti purportedly shot on the streets of Lodz, the Polish Embassy said the pictures could turn American Jews…
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The Go-Between
Between 2002 and 2006, photographer Gillian Laub made more than a dozen trips to Israel and the Palestinian territories to shoot portraits of everyday people going about their lives. Those lives, often interrupted by violence and bearing the scars of the conflict, are explored in her new book, “Testimony” (Aperture). The Forward’s Rebecca Spence spoke…
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The Ivy’s Barbed Embrace
Thousands of American Jewish households were on edge this month awaiting a special guest. No, it wasn’t Elijah the Prophet. It was the college admissions office. Will Chloe and Jonah be headed for Princeton next fall? Or have they set their sights on Harvard? Yale? The University of Michigan, or is it Wellesley? What about…
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Taking Parnassus by Sheer Force of Wit
Selected Poems (American Poets Project) By Kenneth Koch, edited by Ron Padgett The Library of America, 220 pages, $20. Kenneth Koch has not received his due, in part because his Harvard classmates and close friends, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, have overshadowed him, and in part because he could be rambunctiously funny. Poetry, after all,…
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Now 95, a Journalist Finally Looks Back
Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story By Ruth Gruber Schocken, 288 pages, $27.50. In a photograph that still haunts me weeks after I first saw it, a young girl, perhaps 7 years old, faces the camera, clutching a toy. An older boy — 9 or 10 — holds…
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Primo Levi’s Second Language
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Primo Levi’s death. To commemorate the occasion, W.W. Norton & Company is releasing “A Tranquil Star,” a selection of the author’s previously untranslated short stories. Though clearly a tribute, the book is also being touted as a kind of reintroduction to the Italian master: Not only was Levi…
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April 13, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Police arrested Sofia Rosenthal, a resident of Brooklyn, on the suspicion that something untoward occurred with the baby to which she recently gave birth. The infant has since gone missing, and Rosenthal claims that she has no idea what happened to it. In the meantime, a dead baby was…
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