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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Master of the Arts
The Girl With the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the making of the modern art market By Lindsay Pollock PublicAffairs, 368 pages, $30. This past November 6, on a mild autumn evening, some 150 people gathered in Manhattan at the Spain Restaurant on West 13th Street to toast the publication of Lindsay Pollock’s “The Girl…
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Primo Levi’s First Draft Of History
Auschwitz Report By Primo Levi, with Leonardo De Benedetti Edited by Robert S. C. Gordon Verso, 128 pages, $17.95. Although best known for his seminal work, “Survival in Auschwitz,” Primo Levi’s searing memoir was actually his second attempt to grapple with the enormity of Nazi extermination camps. After the Auschwitz system of camps was discovered…
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Fighting for Survival
The Fighter By Jean-Jacques Greif Bloomsbury USA, 288 pages, $16.95. Every book about the Holocaust seems to open up a new world of horrors. The problem, though, is that we are, in many ways, beyond surprises. You mean they’d shoot a Jew because he is too weak to work? Yes, I’ve heard that. They pulled…
The Latest
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A Hip-Hop Hitmaker, Straight Outta Shaker Heights
The young guys who stop Jerry Heller in the street these days never ask if he can make them into pop icons like Elton John, or legends like Creedence Clearwater Revival. The young guys who stop Jerry Heller don’t even want to be latter-day Marvin Gayes. These kids all want to be rap stars. It’s…
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Eyeing the Headlines, From the Ivory Tower
In the field of Jewish studies, academic conferences aren’t exactly known for their timeliness. But one panel at last month’s Association for Jewish Studies conference — the largest annual gathering of scholars in the field — proved remarkable for its topicality. Titled “The Danish Cartoons and the Holocaust Analogy,” the discussion — an exploration, in…
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January 5, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward In an interview in a Minsk synagogue, a local rabbi announced to reporters from the Yiddish press that the best Jewish political party to support is the Bund. While the rabbi insisted on remaining anonymous, he said that because the Duma (Russian Parliament) has nothing to do with religious…
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Haven in the Hollows
Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History By Deborah R. Weiner University of Illinois Press, 264 pages, $60. Neither religion nor Yiddishkeit played a significant role in the life of young Harry Schwachter. A prosperous merchant in Williamson, W.Va., during the early 20th century, Schwachter ate fried apples and country-cured ham every Sunday morning. He “crashed the…
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Rembrandt Revised
As Jewish devotees of Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn are fond of noting, he lived and worked in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter during the “Golden Age” of the 17th century. He painted dozens of portraits of Jews and had a relationship with at least one prominent Jewish figure — Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel. As conventional wisdom…
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Abe’s World: Rereading ‘The Rise of David Levinsky’
It’s not often that I get the chance to reread a novel, especially a big, sprawling novel like “The Rise of David Levinsky,” a cautionary tale about the immigrant experience that Abraham Cahan, longtime editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, had published, to much acclaim, way back in 1917. But thanks to an initiative of…
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Varian Fry’s Mission of Mercy
Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille By Rosemary Sullivan HarperCollins, 544 pages $26.95. Varian Fry arrived in France in 1940 with $3,000 taped to his leg and a list containing the names of 200 European intellectuals believed to be wanted by the Nazis. He planned on staying three weeks. He…
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Forgetting the Past In a City of the Future
‘Every city develops a kind of imagined sense of itself alongside the actual structure of the city,” said Barbara Mann, professor of literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. “But Tel Aviv is an extreme case.” In her new book, “A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space,” Mann documents…
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