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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Shoah Survivor Funds Professorship in Holocaust Studies at Queens College
Queens College, part of the City University of New York, recently announced the endowment of a professorship focusing on Holocaust studies. And the man responsible for funding the position, 93-year-old William Ungar, knows about the Holocaust firsthand. Ungar, who grew up in Poland, survived a concentration camp but lost much of his family, including his…
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Israeli, Palestinian Students Talk ‘Face to Face’
Although Avi Gordis has lived in Jerusalem since he was 9, he had never had a conversation with a Palestinian until last year. “I was afraid of every Palestinian I saw,” Gordis, 17, told the Forward. That changed last summer, when the Face to Face/Faith to Faith Program brought Gordis together with Saleh Alzjary, a…
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The Graphic (Novel) Side of Israel
Pizzeria Kamikaze By Etgar Keret and Asaf Hanuka Translated from Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger Alternative Comics, 100 pages, $14.95. Exit Wounds By Rutu Modan Drawn & Quarterly, 160 pages, $19.95. One of my fondest memories of the year I recently spent in Israel is of walking through the street fair on Emek Refaim, in Jerusalem’s…
The Latest
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Jesse Owens, Man and Myth at the 1936 Olympics
Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics By Jeremy Schaap Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $24. Hitler’s snub of sprinter Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is well known: Unwilling to recognize a black runner’s prowess, the story goes, Hitler refused to acknowledge Owens after the American athlete won the 100-meter dash….
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Critiquing Argentina’s Yellow Journalism
Late in the evening of Friday, December 30, 2005, Pepe Eliaschev, a man renowned for his 20-year run as the sharp-tongued host of Argentina’s daily radio news show “Esto Que Pasa” — in rough translation, “This Is What’s Happening” — received what appeared to be a standard holiday-time phone call. On the other end of…
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Jewish DJ Captivates Arab Ears
For many people, the idea of a Jewish DJ being named a featured artist at venues like the Arab Film Festival or the Arab American National Museum would be a head-scratcher. For global electronica DJ Cheb i Sabbah, however, it’s standard fare. In the four decades of his accomplished career, Sabbah — born Haim Sérge…
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Postwar Germany, Through an African Lens
Somewhere in Germany By Stephanie Zweig, translated by Marlies Comjean University of Wisconsin Press, 280 pages, $24.95. Stephanie Zweig first introduced readers to the Redlich family in her autobiographical novel, “Nowhere in Africa.” Assimilated German Jews who fled Hitler’s Germany in 1938, the family — Walter, Jettel and daughter Regina — spent the war years…
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Directors Without Borders
Jordan’s King Abdullah II recently announced that his country will partner with the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television to create a new film school. The Red Sea Institute of Cinematic Arts will be aimed specifically toward youth of Middle Eastern background and based in the city of Aqaba — significant for its proximity…
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Winning Works
The Jewish Book Council has just announced the winners of the 2006 National Jewish Book Awards, which will be presented March 6 at New York’s Center for Jewish History. Below are some of the winners that were reviewed in the Forward. Click on the book titles to read the reviews. For a complete list of…
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January 12, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward As people went out to the local vaudeville and variety theaters this past weekend, they discovered that the performers had gone on strike. A huge crowd gathered in front of the Grand Music Hall at Orchard and Grand Streets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and waited for the strike…
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Total Recall
After seeing Michael Verhoeven’s new movie, “The Unknown Soldier,” and Paul Verhoeven’s new movie, “Black Book,” both of which were presented last month at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival, one arrives rapidly at the conclusion that it is a very bad idea to lie to anyone by the name of Verhoeven. Born just five days…
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