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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Two Soldiers, Lonely Together
For some young Israelis, the idea of army service still holds romantic possibility: serving one’s country with the promise of adventure, and the opportunity to discover one’s self far from home. The reality is often quite different, with drudgery and endless repetition of dull tasks the markers of another day in the Israel Defense Forces….
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Being a Jew Among the Genteel and Gentile
Matters of Honor By Louis Begley Knopf, 320 pages, $24.95. The ordeal of civility, as defined by sociologist John Murray Cuddihy in his 1974 book, is “the ritually unconsummated courtship of Gentile and Jew.” This phenomenon is a recurrent theme throughout the fiction of Louis Begley. Even more than in his first novel — “Wartime…
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German Book Redefines ‘Victimhood,’ Problematically
The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 By Jörg Friedrich Columbia University Press, 552 pages, $34.95. In the aftermath of World War II, Germany attempted to come to terms with the Holocaust. But ultranationalists were not contrite about the recent past, and contended that the killing of hundreds of thousands of German civilians during the…
The Latest
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February 23, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward With threats by a Russian antisemitic group, the Black Hundreds, to drown the Duma in Jewish blood, the situation for Jews in Russia is steadily worsening. In Odessa, for example, it has never been more dangerous for Jews to be seen in the street by themselves. Nearly all the…
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February 16, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Jacob and Sadie Michaelson, whose wedding was to have taken place February 24, will be buried together after having drowned as a result of the sinking of the steamship Larchmont, which crashed into the pier and sank after arriving in New York City from Providence, R.I. Found washed up…
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Hitler’s Jewish Counterfeiter
Although life in the “golden cage” of Sachsenhausen was deceptively comfortable for Adolf Burger, he believed that the secret he shared with the Nazis was too precious for him to survive. Yet survive the Jewish printer did, and at 89 he is still around to tell his tale. Now, Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky has made…
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The Radical Rationalism of Maimonides
Maimonides’ Confrontation With Mysticism By Menachem Kellner *Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 320 pages, $49.50. * Moses Maimonides (Rambam, in traditional parlance) has been widely lionized as the greatest mind in Jewish history. Even before his death in 1204, the Jews of Yemen went so far as to include his name in their version of…
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You Don’t Have To Be Hungarian, But It Helps
One Must Also Be Hungarian By Adam Biro, translated by Catherine Tihanyi University of Chicago Press, 168 pages, $20. After the death of his 95-year-old father, Imre, and the birth of his first grandchild, Ulysse, Hungarian-born French writer Adam Biro decided to write a book about his family. He called it “Les Ancêtres d’Ulysse” (“Ulysses’s…
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Journalist Profiles Nine Extraordinarily Influential Emigres
The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World By Kati Marton Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $27. My grandmother used to satirically refer to “Die Grossen Ungarischen Jüdischen Übermenschen,” or “The Great Hungarian Jewish Superhumans,” because this subset of Jews were always so relentless in praising their own. But though we…
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A Historical Novel About Ruth, Minus The Sappiness
The Garden of Ruth By Eva Etzioni-Halevy Plume, 304 pages, $14. Novels based on the Old Testament have become quite popular in the past 10 years. While the religious tone and the style tend to vary — some can be read as parables, others as Harlequin romances — one consistent thread has been the highly…
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The Personal And the Political
All Whom I Have Loved By Aharon Appelfeld Schocken, 256 pages, $23. At the beginning of Aharon Appelfeld’s new novel, “All Whom I Have Loved,” 9-year-old Paul Rosenfeld is on summer vacation with his mother, enjoying what are perhaps his last moments of undiluted happiness. He remembers, “Once she put some squares of halva-covered chocolate…
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