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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The Israel Philharmonic Turns 70
The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is older than the State of Israel. It was the brainchild of famous Polish-born, Vienna-based violinist Bronislaw Huberman. A perspicacious virtuoso, Huberman persuaded about 75 musicians from major European orchestras to make a bee-line to Palestine. It wasn’t out of fear of impending danger; it was just a nice cultural idea…
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Buenos Aires Blues
‘Family Law,” Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman’s latest offering, is a movie about lawyers, so almost by necessity the issue of secrets and lies predominates. Only here, the prevarications are of a domestic sort: Ariel Perelmen, a young professor of law, son of Bernardo Perelman, a Buenos Aires criminal attorney, keeps secrets from his wife, Sandra….
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One of Vilna’s Own Trains a Lens on the City
‘As a young girl I took it for granted I would go to university and be a professional, that I would be an artist and a doctor!” exclaimed septuagenarian Mira Jedwabnik Van Doren. Though she’s at an age when most start slowing down, the Vilna-born artist seems to be doing anything but: She has just…
The Latest
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Seeking Compensation for Tragedy
Confronting the Perpetrators: A History of the Claims Conference By Marilyn Henry Vallentine Mitchell, 256 pages, $35. Since 1952, more than 500,000 Jewish victims of Nazism have received compensation from Germany. As imperfect as the term “compensation” sounds in this case, no payment ever would have been made to survivors without the relentless and dedicated…
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A Magazine for the Far-flung
Some Jews arrive in Israel and discover it is their homeland. Other Jews get there only to realize that, after all that, “home” is the place they just left. One such traveler was Joshua Ellison, a young man who moved from Providence, R.I., to Jerusalem on a Dorot Fellowship three years ago. Ellison immediately came…
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December 15, 2006
100 Years Ago In the Forward A cheering crowd of thousands of people eagerly greeted Russian Revolutionary hero Grigory Gershuni when he arrived in New York. Gershuni, a founder of the Socialist Revolutionary party, was also the founder of the Boyuvoya Organizatziye (Fighting Organization), a socialist militant group responsible for numerous assassinations of tsarist figures….
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Sunrise? Sunset?
Jewish culture in Miami Beach: a faded memory, or something that is alive and kicking, though occasionally interrupted by bursts of absurdity? Two new programs — one upcoming on PBS, the other in constant reruns on VH1 — offer opposing views of the state of Yiddishkeit in south Florida’s glitziest strip of sand. “Where Neon…
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A Textured Trilogy of Ghetto Life
The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto By Chava Rosenfarb Translated from the Yiddish by the author, in collaboration with Goldie Morgentaler Book One: On the Brink of the Precipice, 1939 The University of Wisconsin Press, Terrace Books, 314 pages, $16.95. Book Two: From the Depths I Call You, 1940-1942…
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‘Shuckle Rock’ Puts the Pray
On a recent evening, Daniel Seliger leaned against the rickety steps of a graffiti-covered loft building in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, his left hand wrapped around a crumpled paper bag from which the mangled pop-top of a once-frosty Heineken peeked out. Like anyone who has been in the music industry for more than a…
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Lyrics Sparkle in Yiddish ‘Pirates of Penzance’
Poetry, Robert Frost wrote, is what gets lost in translation. Or not, as the case may be. Witness the work of Al Grand, the man behind the Yiddish version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance,” which was presented recently by the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene. Grand’s “Di Yam Gazlonim!” which ran until November 12…
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One Man’s Collection of Jewish Art Finds New Home
Shortly after graduating from Williams College, Sigmund Balka moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the Kennedy administration and decided to collect art. While his collecting interests ranged from modernist prints to Inuit art, Balka was especially drawn to the work of Jewish artists. Even at this young age, Balka perceived the collection of works…
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