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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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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Punky Town
Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 Edited by Brandon Stosuy New York University Press, 510 pages, $29.95 The day the Bowery birthplace of punk CBGB’s closed last month, New Yorkers could open their New York Times and read an obituary for it — an article whose most shocking…
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A Dance Pioneer Gets Her Due
Anna Sokolow’s name may not seem familiar, not even to diehard New Yorkers. But her legacy has been felt — directly or indirectly — by nearly every choreographer since the mid-20th century. An artist who probed deeply into social and political issues, Sokolow also demonstrated a startling versatility: as a teacher and mentor at The…
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Lighting the Way
As the days get shorter and Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, draws nearer, I’ve been thinking about illumination or, more precisely still, about electricity and its relationship to religious ritual. At first blush, electricity and religion made for unlikely companions: One, after all, was bound up with the laboratory and the process of experimentation; the…
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November 24, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward An uproar occurred this week in Russia when a reactionary newspaper printed that Prime Minister Stolipin is descended from a Jewish family. Stolipin’s grandparents were known to have been born in Galitsia, and it has definitely been determined that his great grandfather was a Jewish feldsher (medical assistant). Stolipin,…
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Pretty In Ink
Because it is really too easy to forget just how talented Jules Feiffer really is, consider the following. He has won an Academy Award (in 1961 for the animated short “Munro”) an Obie (for the 1967 play “Little Murders”) and yes, a Pulitzer Prize (in 1986 for cartoons). He wrote the screenplay for “Carnal Knowledge”…
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Spies Like Us: The Jews’ Answer to Bond
Mounted on the dashboard of my black convertible there are two plastic switches, “Grenade Launcher” and “Ejector Seat.” They amuse friends and concern wary parking lot attendants. I own high-tech gadgets ranging from a big-screen television that can do virtually everything except hover, to an IBM laptop with a Celeron processor, to the George Foreman…
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The Hidden and The Manifest
Scholars, like artists, need community — people who see the world in ways similar enough to be supportive but different enough to provoke thought, controversy and inspiration. For me, Rabbi Jill Hammer has long played all those roles. When we teach together, she always seems to “get it,” and to come up with insights or…
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Redefining What Makes A Jewish Story
On a recent fall evening, a bunch of Jews got together to tell some stories for a Chicago audience. Most of them were Jews, at any rate. Except the Palestinian. And one of the African Americans. The other African American, National Public Radio commentator Aaron Freeman, converted to Judaism years ago. If the performers sound…
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Golem Meets ‘Taxi Driver’ in New Novel
Golem Song By Marc Estrin Unbridled Books, 320 pages, $15.95. For Rabbi Loew, the legendary maker of the original Prague-based golem, his creation was a photographic negative of the studious, passive Jew: muscular rather than atrophied; doltish rather than learned; a man of action, not of words. For Alan Krieger, antihero of Marc Estrin’s novel…
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Return of the European Jew
Being Jewish in the New Germany By Jeffrey M. Peck Rutgers University Press, 224 pages, $24.95. Turning the Kaleidoscope: Perspectives on European Jewry Edited by Sandra Lustig and Ian Leveson Berghahn Books, 288 pages, $80. In 1946, Robert Welsch, a German Jewish journalist who had fled to Palestine during World War II, went back to…
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