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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Jonathan Safran Foer To Release English Version of Haggadah
Jonathan Safran Foer will be releasing a new English version of the Passover Haggadah, the best-selling novelist recently confirmed, speaking to a packed German audience at the American Academy in Berlin’s lakeside villa on the outskirts of the capital. With more than 4,000 known versions of the book once or currently existing, the Haggadah—which tells…
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The Last Word
Joseph Friedenson is anxious. A deadline is approaching, and he’s got to put the next edition of Dos Yiddishe Vort to bed. Never mind that he hasn’t missed a deadline — in 54 years. He’s still worried. Then again, he doesn’t have much help. Friedenson, whom I know as Uncle Yossel, has been editing this…
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Why ‘Sammy’ Won’t Run — At Least Not on Film
Although Hollywood has changed plenty since Budd Schulberg’s fictionalized exposé “What Makes Sammy Run?” first hit stands in 1941, the novel’s pioneering take on the lure of money and power remains timeless. The story’s inimitable antihero, Sammy Glick, reacts against his lower-class Jewish upbringing to become an amoral hustler who cons his way into running…
The Latest
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March 23, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward As Samuel Wachman and Lina Hentshuch stood under the chupah, about to be pronounced man and wife, a screaming woman with a child in tow came into the Eldridge St. Synagogue with a policeman. The woman claimed that she was Wachman’s wife and that Wachman, allegedly the father of…
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Not a Nice Jewish Girl
British singer Amy Winehouse is not a nice Jewish girl. And it’s not just a question of the tattoos. Nor is it her positively epic boozing. (Her father, a London cabdriver, claims that she is not an alcoholic, because she does not drink every day. Perhaps. But there was that really embarrassingly drunken television performance,…
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Paying Homage to a Mentor
When choreographer Zvi Gotheiner left Israel in 1976 to come to New York, he was a young protégé of his dance teacher, Gertrud Kraus. Often considered to be the first lady of Israeli dance, Kraus taught dance not as a bland curriculum but as the making of art. Despite the fact that Kraus died 30…
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A Haunting Tale of a Lost World
Grandfather’s Acres By Isaac Metzker Translated from the Yiddish by Margaret and Yossel Birstein Gefen Publishing House, 432 pages, $19.95. Some of you will know the name Isaac Metzker (1900-1984). He was a teacher for the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring who also served for decades as a journalist for the Jewish Daily Forward, where he edited…
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This (Televised) American Life
Perhaps it’s a stretch to describe any public radio personality as a superstar. But if there were such a thing, Ira Glass, host of the weekly radio show “This American Life,” would be it. Glass, 47, is nerdy in a hip kind of way, and he unselfconsciously professes his love, in equal measures, for radio…
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The Jewish Roots of a Feminist Icon
In recent weeks, feminist artist Judy Chicago has been the subject of considerable attention, much of it revolving around the news that her seminal work, “The Dinner Party,” (1974-79), has finally found a permanent home as the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Museum’s newly constructed Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, opening later this month….
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Biblical Heroes in Dire Straits
Israeli photographer Adi Nes began his latest series, Biblical Stories, at a moment of crisis in his own life. “I just ended a long-term relationship; I was alone with no money, no apartment, no job. The economic situation was very bad in Israel; most of my friends were unemployed. Also, my father passed away,” he…
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March 16, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward This week’s Bintel Brief describes a terrible situation in which a clothing manufacturer writes of a 16-year-old girl who works in his shop and won’t go home at night because her mother is trying to force her to become a prostitute. Telling both the girl and her younger sister…
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