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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Looking Back December 8, 2006
100 Years Ago in the forward After marrying and then dumping at least four women, serial groom Samuel Shopkin has been busted and is now sitting alone in a cell in the Tombs. Lining up to testify against him are his first wife, Dora Shvalsboim-Shopkin, and his second wife, Minnie Trommer-Shopkin. Two other women have…
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Dancing with Demons
Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins By Amanda Vaill Broadway, 539 pages, $40. By all accounts, Jerome Robbins, the man behind “Fancy Free,” “Dances at a Gathering,” “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof” — and, for many years, George Balanchine’s number two at the New York City Ballet — was a perfectionist, an…
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After Years of Decline, Cantorial Music Gets a Second Act
This past Sunday, a concert featuring a Hasidic cantor and 64 members of the New York Philharmonic drew 4,000 listeners to a sold-out Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Tickets went for as much as $250, and those on the waiting list numbered more than 1,000. Last month, at a conference co-sponsored by the Conservative…
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Tiny Ninja Talmudists
It doesn’t even start out like a normal puppet show. The puppeteer — yes, there is a puppeteer — stands behind the table. He lays out a clock, a prayerbook, a pair of smiley-face finger puppets (yes, there are puppets, at least), and a plate of, uh, plastic food and chattering teeth. And then he…
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An Eastern European ‘Exodus’
A Day of Small Beginnings By Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum Little, Brown and Company, 384 pages, $24.99. ‘I think our ghosts are everywhere, all the time,” a young Polish man tells a visiting American Jew in Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum’s deeply heartfelt first novel. “The past does not leave us. And we do not leave the past.”…
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Remembering the Y.U. of Yore
My Yeshiva College: 75 Years of Memories Edited by Menachem Butler and Zev Nagel Yashar Books, 387 pages, $21.95. With all the hoopla surrounding last year’s commemoration of the 75th anniversary of Yeshiva College, the most interesting retrospective came about through the efforts of two recent graduates of Yeshiva University, the central institution of Modern…
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Back to Berlin
What would happen if, in our time, a German chancellor urged 6 million Jews to relocate to Germany? That is the question posed by Israel Horovitz’s play “Lebensraum,” which will enjoy a limited engagement at off-Broadway’s Kirk Theatre at Theatre Row from December 13 through December 30. In “Lebensraum,” a German chancellor does indeed make…
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Absurdity Returns to Chelm
Because Jewish folk humor depicts Chelm as a town inhabited by naive fools, few people realize that Chelm is actually a real town in Eastern Poland that was once home to 18,000 Jews and was highly regarded as a center of Torah study. Now, a half-century after nearly this whole population perished in the death…
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December 1, 2006
100 Years Agoin the forward The ladies of Manhattan’s Lower East Side are once again agitating against the meat industry, protesting high prices and boycotting butcher shops. Particularly active are local residents Esther Dolbovsky and Rebecca Reznik, who have organized a number of protests. One butcher, of Brenner’s Butcher Shop, apparently took umbrage at the…
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A Cantor’s Tale
He was a vaudeville star who was offered $100,000 to appear in Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer.” He toured North America, Europe and Palestine to tremendous acclaim, earning record fees and a kiss from Enrico Caruso. When he died in 1933, at the age of 51, more than 5,000 people attended his funeral in Israel,…
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Arts-or-Crafts
When a friend’s 4-year-old son embraced one of Ruth Duckworth’s pots and said “Mama,” the sculptor made an unusual choice: She let the name stick. Duckworth, who has always resisted labeling her pieces, now calls some of them “Mama Pots.” This was a rare concession for an artist who generally grants viewers complete interpretive control…
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