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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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…
The Latest
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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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Forward Memories
Used to run down to the corner for bubbe and zayde’s paper? Picked up lessons for life from the Bintel Brief? Found your truly beloved through a shadkhan’s ad? Had a moment pictured in the Rotogravure? If you’ve got a Forverts tale to tell, we want to hear it. This year the Forward turns 110,…
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Is He or Isn’t He?
In the concluding scene of Richard Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” which will be performed at the Metropolitan Opera this month, the opera’s hero delivers a powerful monologue extolling the virtues of “Holy German Art” in the face of foreign influences. At the 1924 Bayreuth Festival — the first since the outbreak of World War…
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Anne Frank on the Reservation
The recent discovery of a trove of letters from Otto Frank to American officials may have returned attention to the wartime plight of the Frank family, but, as an exhibition set to open in the American Southwest next month shows, Anne Frank has never really strayed far from the collective imagination — and not only…
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Gilding the Lily –– and the Thistle
Ironically, Barbara Wolff was driven back in time to the laborious techniques of medieval illumination by nothing less than today’s icon of modernity: the computer. When the accomplished botanical illustrator, who would spend days drawing a flower perspective, saw that the same thing could be done instantly with computer-aided design, she knew her craft was…
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Bruno Schulz on Stage
‘Double Edge,” the inventive and free-spirited experimental theater troupe based in Ashfield, Mass., turns 25 this year. To celebrate the improbable journey, Stacy Klein, its director, is adapting for the stage the work of Bruno Schulz, running through March 18 at La MaMa in Manhattan. Under the title “Republic of Dreams,” the performance is a…
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