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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February 2, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward The first Yiddish theater school has opened its doors in New York City on East Broadway. Run by M.J. Lavrovsky, a graduate of the Moscow School of Drama, the Titakoni Drama School offers courses in acting, singing, dancing, elocution, physical culture and more, all taught by experienced performers from…
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The Jewish McLuhan
The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness By Mel Alexenberg Intellect, 187 pages, $60. As a wakeup call to “an indifferent world” and “Jews with their heads in the sand,” Mel Alexenberg designed a Holocaust memorial to honor the 6 million Jews in Israel “incinerated by an Iranian nuclear…
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A Historian-Soldier Bridges His Identities
Sitting on a stage in a mahogany-paneled study of the townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that contains the venerable Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Oren, the historian, was getting frustrated with the questions the standing room-only audience was lobbing at him. He had come to talk about his new book, a history of America’s…
The Latest
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Bible Wars
Now that Christmas has come and gone, we’re apt to think that pitched discussions about religion in the public square (all those crèches and Christmas trees and menorahs and overwrought television commentators like you-know-who) are a seasonal affair. But if history teaches anything, it’s that these discussions are always with us. I’d even go a…
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Free Speech at City College
In early October 2001, the City College of New York’s faculty union, alarmed by what it saw as a wave of jingoism unleashed by the 9/11 attacks, decided to stage a teach in. Titled “Threats of War, Challenges of Peace,” the session was seen in some quarters as unpatriotic, seditious even. The New York Post…
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Jewish Book Award Winners
The following are the winners of the 2006 National Jewish Book Awards, announced last week by the Jewish Book Council: JEWISH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD “A Code of Jewish Ethics, Vol. 1: You Shall Be Holy” Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (Crown Publishing Group) . AMERICAN JEWISH STUDIES “Emma Lazarus” Esther Schor (Schocken/Nextbook) . ANTHOLOGIES AND…
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Early Hitler, Late Mailer
The Castle in the Forest By Norman Mailer Random House, 496 pages, $27.95. What to say about what might be Norman Mailer’s last novel, except to voice hope for a novel that might’ve been better? Or maybe to ask the gods to give him more time — another year or two, or 10 — to…
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January 26, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Meyer Schwartz, 17, and 16-year-old Gussie Kling, both of New York City, killed themselves in a suicide pact after their parents refused to give them permission to marry. The two were cousins and grew up around the corner from each other, Schwartz on Broome Street and Kling on Orchard…
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Teddy’s Town
The evening after Teddy Kollek lost his last race for mayor of Jerusalem in 1993, after 28 years at the city’s helm, I sat in an Arabic language class at the Hebrew University. The teacher, a Muslim from East Jerusalem, asked his students, a motley assemblage of young, chatty left-wingers, retirees and barrel-chested young men…
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Animating Hasidism
Ukraine, 1876: In the shtetl of Lubavitch, a scribe named Sammy Harkham procrastinates at his job inking mezuzas, bickers with his wife and tries to avoid his disapproving rabbi. Los Angeles, 2006: The tribulations of Ukrainian Sammy Harkham are the subject of a serial comic strip called “Lubavitch,” created by a punk-rock-loving 26-year-old also named…
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Sex and Survival on The Lower East Side
In 1966, the Jewish Daily Forward serialized Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish novel, “Sonim, de Geshichte fun a Leib,” a tale of the psychological and sexual neuroses of Holocaust survivor Herman Cohen in 1940s New York, and those of the female company he keeps. The story was later published as “Enemies, A Love Story” and then…
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