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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Finding Deeper Truths in Fiction
For weeks, many of us “Diaspora Jews” have kept ourselves neck-deep in news from the Middle East: jumping out of bed to check the front page, keeping the television on all night, refreshing Web sites for the latest headlines. Of course, our new routine pales in comparison to what it could be — dashing into…
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Sephardic Culture Enjoys a Renaissance — in Spain
Forty-seven years ago, when Moroccan farming engineer Jacobo Israel Garzón immigrated north to Spain for work, he found a country fiercely opposed to discussion — at least a discussion with anything positive to say — about its Jewish past. “In 1959 there wasn’t a book about Jews in Spain that wasn’t antisemitic,” said Israel Garzón,…
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A Shoah Story, From Israel
Our Holocaust By Amir Gutfreund, Translated by Jessica Cohen The Toby Press, 407 pages, $24.95. ‘Tain’t what a man sez, but wot he means that the traducer has got to bring over.” Thus Ezra Pound to W.H.D. Rouse, on literature. What a difference a definite article makes. In its Hebrew original, the title of Amir…
The Latest
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Exploring the American-Israeli Alliance
Michelle Mart, a historian at Penn State University, adopts a novel approach to understanding the special relationship — a battle of “cultural narratives” within America that Israel won and the Arabs lost. In her view, an American culture in the aftermath of World War II that was truly inhospitable to antisemitism became wedded to a…
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Delving Into the Core of the Self
Yale University Press has just published “Life Is With Others,” a collection of essays written by the late Donald J. Cohen and various colleagues. Cohen, who succumbed to cancer in 2001 at the age of 61, directed the Yale Child Study Center for nearly two decades, conducted pioneering research into autism and Tourette’s Syndrome, and…
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Screening Chantal Akerman
For certain film buffs, Chantal Akerman is famous as the director of one of the screen’s most legendary endurance tests. Akerman’s masterpiece, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), as the precise title might indicate, is a remarkably focused three-and-a-half-hour study of the mundane routine of a Brussels housewife — the ultimate realist…
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Women Ending Badly
Jackpot By Tsipi Keller Spuyten Duyvil, 224 pages, $13. Retelling By Tsipi Keller Spuyten Duyvil, 288 pages, $14. Readers of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” always know that Raskolnikov committed murder, but they often don’t know whether Raskolnikov knows that he committed murder. It is in this wonderful vagary, more than among any writerly tricks of…
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Cruise Control
Imagine the perfect cruise — surrounded by peaceful waters, drifting past ancient towns, atmospheric music playing in the background. Now, if those waters and towns are Ukrainian, and that music you’re imagining is klezmer, have we got a cruise for you. In April 2007 (if all goes according to plan), a boat of 150 Jewish…
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Thinking Past the Nazis
Berlin Childhood Around 1900 By Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland Harvard University Press, 208 pages, $14.95. If you have ever heard of the great German literary critic and theorist Walter Benjamin, you probably know something of his suicide. In 1940, Benjamin tried to flee from France to Spain, only to be turned back with…
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Beyond the Noise: Exploring the U.S.-Saudi Relationship
*Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership With Saudi Arabia By Rachel Bronson Oxford University Press, 384 pages, $28. In her new book, “Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership With Saudi Arabia,” scholar Rachel Bronson fires an opening shot by asserting that “recent books seem more intent on feeding public outrage than on seriously probing the…
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A Driving Force in Jewish Life
Much has been written of late about the Interstate highway system, which celebrated its 50th birthday just last month. A legacy of the 1950s, along with Elvis Presley and Lawrence Welk, the Montgomery bus boycott and the atom bomb, its 47,000 miles of roadways transformed the American landscape and modern American life in equal measure….
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