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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Books
Writing the Book on Klezmer
In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I’m personally indebted to Yale Strom. I keep a hardcover copy of his reference work “The Book of Klezmer: The History, the Music, the Folklore” (Chicago Review Press, 2002) on the bookshelf that rings the ceiling in my apartment. Whenever I need to check a…
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Books Hasidic Authors Offer Readers a Thrill
The Internet contains scores of Hasidic-dominated Yiddish sites, including chat rooms, blogs, bulletin boards and a separate version of Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia. Reading one of the Yiddish bulletin boards, I came across the following dismissive comments of an anonymous critic: “Give a look and you’ll see that nowadays all [ultra-Orthodox] Yiddish newspapers and…
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Books Publisher Opens Final Chapter
Last month’s publication of “The Cross and Other Jewish Stories” by Ukrainian-born Yiddish author Lamed Shapiro marks both a new beginning and the beginning of the end for the New Yiddish Library Series. “The Cross” is the seventh book of the series, a collaborative effort involving the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, the…
The Latest
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Cooking Up A New Niche:The Chef Shot
France, as we know, is a country fiercely attached to its many traditions. Every January, Lyon — that cradle of haute cuisine spanning the vine-endowed banks of the Rhône River, home to world-famous chef Paul Bocuse — welcomes the nation’s top gastronomy fair, internationally known by its French acronym, Sirha. This past January, the city…
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Between Us Girls
Strange as it may sound, I’ve been thinking a lot about dolls this month, or, more to the point, perhaps, about girl culture in modern America. Some of my thoughts were triggered by the imperatives of academic research: I was preparing a talk on the material culture of Jewish teenage girls of the 1950s for…
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A New Book Probes Chagall’s Conflicts and Contradictions
Marc Chagall By Jonathan Wilson Schocken Books, 256 pages, $19.95. What are we supposed to do with Marc Chagall? Picasso admired him as a colorist, but, on the whole, Chagall is not remembered for his painterly technique. People know him for his subjects — for his off-kilter, dreamy takes on life in a Hasidic shtetl,…
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A Stitch in Time
Broken Threads: The Destruction of the Jewish Fashion Industry in Germany and Austria Edited by Roberta S. Kremer Berg, 136 pages, 29.95. No one can accuse Magda Goebbels of having been impervious to the damage wrought on Kristallnacht. “What a nuisance,” Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s wife said upon hearing that a clothier she favored,…
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Once Suppressed, Composers Enjoy Revival
James Conlon, music director of Los Angeles Opera, and Marilyn Ziering, a Beverly Hills philanthropist, met for the first time only a year ago, but they have become fast friends. A common interest unites them: making sure that music suppressed by the Nazis and then largely forgotten — much of it by Jewish composers —…
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A Documentary Wrings Poetry From Politics
Almost as inevitable as the endless feature stories about the recent increase in political documentaries is the limpness of the films themselves. A strong documentary demands both surprising characters and a rich ethical imagination; make subjects’ impulses too obvious, as many of these films do, and you wind up with pamphleteering, pandering or Michael Moore….
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March 2, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward Poor Annie Grossman, a young aguna, sits in her tiny room on Rivington Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, wondering what she’s going to do. One of the many bandits and charlatans that roam the Jewish quarter, preying on lonely young women, managed to swindle Annie out of $600…
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‘West Bank’ Musical Comedy Wins Oscar
“West Bank Story,” a musical comedy about the eruption of love between an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian falafel-stand worker, won this year’s Academy Award for best live short. “To be able to get this award just goes to show that there are so many people out there that support that notion that when it…
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