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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Yet Another Look At Bashevis
Isaac B. Singer: A Life By Florence Noiville Translated from the French by Catherine Temerson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 181 pages, $24. By now, the English-speaking world’s embrace of the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer should be evident to all. Beginning in 1953, when his story “Gimpel the Fool,” translated by Saul Bellow, was published…
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When Reality Overwhelms Creativity
Awake in the Dark By Shira Nayman Scribner, 304 pages, $24. ‘Awake in the Dark,” Shira Nayman’s collection of short stories about American children of Holocaust survivors, is being launched into the chain stores with the highest of book-club hopes. The publisher’s press release features praise from Ursula Hegi (“brilliant and mystical stories”), and printed…
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Il Duce’s Own Idea
The Jews In Mussolini’s Italy from Equality to Persecution By Michele Sarfatti The University of Wisconsin Press, 419 pages, $57.30. In 1934, Benito Mussolini famously declared that “there has never been antisemitism in Italy.” A mere four years later, after abandoning his Jewish mistress of 27 years, he passed his infamous racial laws. Michele Sarfatti’s…
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Baghdad Blues
This month, Free Press publishes “Last Days in Babylon: The History of a Family, the Story of a Nation,” by British journalist Marina Benjamin. In “Last Days in Babylon,” Benjamin follows the decline and near destruction of a once-thriving Iraqi Jewish community through the story of her grandmother, the daughter of a proud Iraqi family…
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Mafia Jews: Inside a Genuine Cabal
Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s Hidden Power Brokers By Gus Russo Bloomsbury USA, 592 pages, $34.95. The Jewish people are instructed to be a “light unto the nations” — and what society could use more illumination than the underworld? So goes the story of mob lawyer Sidney Korshak, whose partnerships…
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October 20, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward As Morris Rosen and Louis Freedman walked up the stairs of an East Harlem wedding hall to attend the wedding of Sam Milner and Mary Rosenthal, two Italians jumped out and started punching them. Hearing their screams, the entire wedding party poured out of the hall and began chasing…
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Deconstructing Philip
When the synagogue that Philip Johnson designed free of charge to atone for his antisemitic past added a canopy over its entry two decades ago, the celebrated architect complained that the vinyl overhang was a blot on his creation. Now, less than two years after Johnson’s death, the congregation has gutted the synagogue’s cathedral-like interior…
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Kafka, Divided and Onstage
It is mainly Jewish readers who think of Kafka as a Jewish writer. This isn’t a matter of possessiveness, the way one claims a sports hero for an ethnic group — after all, if one wanted to claim a writer to carry the Jews into world literature, would it be asking too much to pick…
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What’s the Right Course for the Religious Left?
The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right By Michael Lerner HarperSanFrancisco, 416 pages, $24.95. Christian right thinkers often argue that secularism is itself a religion. Enlightenment rationalism, they’ll say, is based on the same kind of faith as biblical literalism. In their 2005 book “Lord of All: Developing a…
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The Restless Opera Company
Many musicians can trace their choice of career to an act of teenage rebellion. But Eric Stern may be one of the few whose youthful bad-boy urges led him to opera — though, to be fair, his Vagabond Opera ensemble is not your standard opera company. Nor is Stern your standard opera singer. Stern’s parents…
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Angels & Demons
On the eve of the release of Freida Lee Mock’s new documentary “Wrestling with Angels,” a glimpse into the post-9/11 world of playwright/activist Tony Kushner, the Forward’s Gabriel Sanders caught up with the writer to see what he thought of the film. One problem: Kushner can’t stand seeing himself on tape and hadn’t yet brought…
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