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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Warhol’s Tribe
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Andy Warhol — as good a time as any to reminisce, in these pages, about the famed artist’s place in Jewish history. Although Warhol is best known for his portraits of such pop icons as Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy, in 1980 he also completed…
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Kissing and Telling
The Great Kisser By David Evanier Rager Media, Inc. 179 pages, $24.95 Though David Evanier should best be known as a writer of stories that feign to punch and kick in the upstart manner of their Chosen People, he also traffics in the ethnicities of others, having authored nonfiction volumes on singers Bobby Darin and…
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Our Dueling Playwright
This month, Theater for a New Audience, a New York City-based theater that is committed to the canon of world dramatic literature, offers a series of free staged readings of four plays concerned with the issue of Jewish otherness in western society. Three of the plays are by well-known English-language writers: Arnold Wesker (“Shylock”), A.R….
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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…
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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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