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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A Life in Search of Meaning: Heschel at 100
The 1965 photograph of Abraham Joshua Heschel walking arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Alabama in support of African American civil rights is a source of great pride in the Jewish community. It represents a shining moment in our recent history, when thousands of young Jews, along with a…
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December 29, 2006
100 Years Ago In the Forward After this week’s assassination of tsarist adviser Aleksei Ignatieff, the Jews of Kiev have been informed that they have 24 hours to leave the city or they will be deported. Ignatieff is widely thought to have been the brains behind the 1882 May Laws, which presented Russia’s Jews with…
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The Portable Legacy
Lubavitch Hasidim may be torn over the earthly status of their erstwhile rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, but if there is a matter on which the movement’s adherents can find common ground, it is the sacredness of the sect’s world headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. On the surface, 770…
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A South-of-the-Border Search for Identity
In my view, complaints about a film misrepresenting the source on which it is based miss the point. Once a writer sells the material and agrees to no longer be involved, the product is beyond his domain. He might as well sit back and enjoy the show, just like any other spectator. A few years…
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How Dunkirk Saved the Jews
Each time the anniversary of the evacuation from Dunkirk and the fall of France comes round, more paeans of praise are written about the “miraculous” escape. But those eulogizing both the bravery on the beaches and the men who manned those celebrated little ships rarely stop to mention the consequences that would have followed if…
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A Triumvirate of Evil
If Roman Polanski’s 2005 cinematic adaptation of “Oliver Twist” and Al Pacino’s performance as Shylock in the recent film “The Merchant of Venice” have not satisfied your cravings for Jewish malefactors, you’ll be delighted to hear that Theater for a New Audience is about to present us with a jam-packed program devoted to the upper…
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Leopold Bloom’s Brothers
Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History By Cormac Ó. Gráda Princeton University Press, 320 pages, $35. My Irish Catholic grandmother fulfilled a life-long goal in her 80s when she traveled to the Holy Land; however, the story she told on her return was not of the sights she’d seen. Wandering around…
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Jewish Punks Unite
To commence each show on the Eight Crazy Nights tour, a flame was colored in above the menorah drawn on a bass drum. The drum set was then shared by three Jewish-oriented punk bands that joined forces to celebrate Hanukkah in West Coast punk venues. The tour featured a magical world where Manischewitz wine flows…
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Looking Back December 22, 2006
100 Years Ago In the Forward As more than 50 workers looked on, 25-year-old Louise Segal murdered the foreman in Louise Fink’s Bookbinding Shop. While initial police inquiries into these events indicated that the murder was the result of a love triangle gone bad, this theory turned out to be false. Apparently, Segal was working…
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Double Vision
Does a scholar’s theory render moot the debate about a play’s antisemitism? Shylock is Shakespeare By Kenneth Gross University of Chicago Press, 184 pages, $22.50 Sometimes, when the traditional tools of the trade just don’t cut it, a scholar is forced to get creative. In the closing pages of “Freud’s Moses,” a 1991 study of…
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Rattling the Chains Of American Poetry
Girly Man By Charles Bernstein University of Chicago Press, 186 pages, $24. In the late 1970s, when I was studying creative writing at a fancy Eastern college, I spent a good deal of my time worrying about “finding my voice.” Like most of my friends, I dreamed of achieving a sincere and brandable style, one…
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