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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Urban Portraits
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Serge J-F. Levy worked as a photojournalist for 10 years, publishing his work in such magazines as Harper’s, ESPN and Life before turning to the art world. His first major solo exhibition in the United States, In Private, which is showing at Gallery 339 in Philadelphia,…
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The Unlikely Hipster
Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life & Times of Doc Pomus By Alex Halberstadt Da Capo Press, 264 pages, $26. In 1959, 10 of the songs that Doc Pomus wrote with Mort Schuman — including “Teenager in Love” (which the lead singer thought sounded “faggy”) — made it to the upper reaches of the pop charts….
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Law and Order: Special Galitsianer Unit
**A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History* By Michael Stanislawski Princeton University Press, 160 pages, $21.95. On September 6, 1848, a young Orthodox Jew with the very inauspicious name of A.B. Pilpel (Hebrew for pepper), bearded with sidelocks and dressed in a black hat and a long caftan, entered the…
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Reshuffling History’s Deck
Farthing By Jo Walton Tor Books, 320 pages, $25.95. The alternative-history novel — in which the now-familiar progression of events is rendered unfamiliar by rips in the fabric of the past — fulfills an essential need to which only literature, or another of the arts, is capable of administering. Considering that the world is the…
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March 9, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward Police arrested Leon Schwartz and Louis Green, the owners of a shirt-and-pants factory in Philadelphia, after fire marshals charged them with intentionally igniting their factory in order to get an $8,000 claim from their insurance company. Because one worker died after jumping from the fourth floor, there is a…
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A Jew Among the Inuit
As Norman Cohn will tell you now, he believes that the Jews and the Eskimos are the longest tribal survivors in history. But it’s a shared trait that the New York Jewish pioneer video artist had not considered until he found a spiritual home, and community work, among the Inuit people of Igloolik in the…
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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…
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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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