Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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Mourning with Freud
Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk By Matthew von Unwerth Riverhead, 256 pages, $23.95. * * *| ‘Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk” by Matthew von Unwerth is a meditation, a fugue — conceivably a psychoanalytic novella –– that has at its nexus…
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Airing the Family’s (Blood-stained) Laundry
Blood Relation By Eric Konigsberg HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25.95. * * *| As a teenager at a boarding school, journalist Eric Konigsberg came across a groundskeeper who once had worked the mob beat as a New York cop. The man asked Eric if he was related to infamous mob hitman Harold Konigsberg. Thanks to his…
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Fragments of a Lost Jewish World
Young Turk By Moris Farhi Arcade Publishing, 392 pages, $25. * * *| Toward the end of Moris Farhi’s elegiac, ambitious novel, a professor of literature who is the voice of Turkish conscience in the book tells a budding Turkish Jewish writer: “One thing, young Turk: Don’t lose the young Jew. Cherish everybody’s difference. If…
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A Family Snapshot, in Black and White
Off-White: A Memoir By Laurie Gunst Soho Press, 288 pages, $25. * * *| Rhoda Cobin Lloyd died in October 1986. Her funeral was a small, open-casket affair that ended with a eulogy by Laurie Gunst, Southern Jew and historian. The eulogy was short: All Gunst could say was that Lloyd’s parents, Sam and Julie,…
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FLASH FRAMES
Vladimir Jabotinsky may be best known as the father of Revisionist Zionism and as the author of the essay “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs,” but he also was a novelist who is known for his Zionist re-fashioning of the biblical hero Samson. Written in Russian, “The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in…
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Romance for the AARP Set
If you can brave Harry Freund’s debut novel, you’re in for a thrill ride that only the raucousness of an aging Jewish social scene can provide. “Love With Noodles: An Amorous Widower’s Tale” (Carroll & Graf) is set on the Manhattan’s dangerous and rocky terrain known as the Jewish Upper East Side. Our navigator, Dan…
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Jacob van Ruisdael Is Not Jewish
‘Sir, I think you are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp in trying to find a firm connection,” Seymour Slive told me over the phone from his Maine summer home. At 85, Slive is Gleason professor of fine arts emeritus at Harvard University, former director of the Harvard Art Museums, and the Ruisdael scholar — with a collection…
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The Plot Thickens, With Female Rabbis Stirring the Pot
The rabbi. In popular culture, he has been everywhere — on the page, of course, but also on the small and big screens. He has been a moral center, a family supporter, a shyster, a pontificator (naturally); he has been an ancillary character and a main one; he has been a villain and a hero….
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Strategic Difference
Halacha (Jewish law and practice) doesn’t ordinarily care about its own interpretations. So long as the Jew does what he or she is supposed to do, the system doesn’t care why he does it or how she understands what she does. For this reason, the great codes of Jewish law describe what is required of…
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October 21, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A group of hooligans, the same group that attacked the Bund headquarters on Manhattan’s East Broadway on Yom Kippur, showed up again this week outside the organization’s offices. As the group of delinquents stood outside, banging on the windows and laughing loudly, one of the Bundists, Comrade Berger, went…
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Exploring Latin Music, In and Out of the Ivory Tower
Traditional Cuban popular music — the kind of stuff that was big in the 1940s and became big again in the late 1990s, thanks to the Buena Vista Social Club — is designed to get you out of your chair and onto the dance floor. And if you listen carefully, you’ll notice that much of…
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