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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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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February 9, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward The Forward is alerting its readers to be wary of the numerous beggars and charlatans that have flooded New York’s streets over the past few years. Among them are the well-known “bread-throwers”— people who throw pieces of dirty bread onto the sidewalks, wait until a woman walks by, and…
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God on the Mind, and on the Mic
‘God has changed since Genesis,” sings Romy Hoffman, aka Macromantics, on her new album — and then follows it up with a sly vocal wink at the listener: “Haven’t we all?” It’s a rare burst into song for the Australian hip-hop emcee whose debut album, “Moments in Movement,” was released last month. But Macromantics definitely…
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Curating Casablanca
A t first glance — given the recent history of Jews in Arab lands — the statistics for Morocco’s Jewish community are unsurprising, even if startling. A population of roughly 265,000 in 1948 has dwindled to merely 5,000, as most Moroccan Jews have immigrated to Israel, Europe and North America. Yet Morocco, almost an entire…
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Where the Borscht Sounds Like the Sea
What a great idea! Most people who know of Woody Guthrie associate him with Dust Bowl ballads of economic hardship, or with the lefty patriotism of “This Land Is Your Land” (like many such songs, its political bite has been dulled by repetition). But not many know that, from 1942 until his slow decline into…
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The Bloody History Of a Disastrous Libel
Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840 By Ronald Florence Other Press, 272 pages, $15.95. ‘It is obvious to me… that you killed him to take his blood and that that’s your custom. Don’t you know about the expulsion from Spain and other expulsions, and about the thousands of Jews killed because of this issue?…
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Inspired by Henson — and Schneerson
Dovid Taub has two main inspirations: Jim Henson and the Lubavitcher rebbe. Through his ability to knit threads of holiness and ancient kabbalistic wisdom into the fabric of his puppetry, Taub has created a comedy sitcom to which fellow Hasidim return every week. The “Itche Kadoozy Show” features a Hasidic rabbi and his troublemaking young…
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Paying Tribute to a Living Legend
Novelist, story-writer and memoirist Jakov Lind turns 80 on February 10. No longer a refugee and no longer writing, for the past decade he’s been unwillingly rooted in London, slowly dying from a motor neuron disease. He is scandalously under-read in his native Austria, and ignobly neglected, too, in the countries of his second written…
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