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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Haven in the Hollows
Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History By Deborah R. Weiner University of Illinois Press, 264 pages, $60. Neither religion nor Yiddishkeit played a significant role in the life of young Harry Schwachter. A prosperous merchant in Williamson, W.Va., during the early 20th century, Schwachter ate fried apples and country-cured ham every Sunday morning. He “crashed the…
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Rembrandt Revised
As Jewish devotees of Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn are fond of noting, he lived and worked in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter during the “Golden Age” of the 17th century. He painted dozens of portraits of Jews and had a relationship with at least one prominent Jewish figure — Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel. As conventional wisdom…
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Abe’s World: Rereading ‘The Rise of David Levinsky’
It’s not often that I get the chance to reread a novel, especially a big, sprawling novel like “The Rise of David Levinsky,” a cautionary tale about the immigrant experience that Abraham Cahan, longtime editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, had published, to much acclaim, way back in 1917. But thanks to an initiative of…
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Varian Fry’s Mission of Mercy
Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille By Rosemary Sullivan HarperCollins, 544 pages $26.95. Varian Fry arrived in France in 1940 with $3,000 taped to his leg and a list containing the names of 200 European intellectuals believed to be wanted by the Nazis. He planned on staying three weeks. He…
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Forgetting the Past In a City of the Future
‘Every city develops a kind of imagined sense of itself alongside the actual structure of the city,” said Barbara Mann, professor of literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. “But Tel Aviv is an extreme case.” In her new book, “A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space,” Mann documents…
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A Life in Search of Meaning: Heschel at 100
The 1965 photograph of Abraham Joshua Heschel walking arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Alabama in support of African American civil rights is a source of great pride in the Jewish community. It represents a shining moment in our recent history, when thousands of young Jews, along with a…
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December 29, 2006
100 Years Ago In the Forward After this week’s assassination of tsarist adviser Aleksei Ignatieff, the Jews of Kiev have been informed that they have 24 hours to leave the city or they will be deported. Ignatieff is widely thought to have been the brains behind the 1882 May Laws, which presented Russia’s Jews with…
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The Portable Legacy
Lubavitch Hasidim may be torn over the earthly status of their erstwhile rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, but if there is a matter on which the movement’s adherents can find common ground, it is the sacredness of the sect’s world headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. On the surface, 770…
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A South-of-the-Border Search for Identity
In my view, complaints about a film misrepresenting the source on which it is based miss the point. Once a writer sells the material and agrees to no longer be involved, the product is beyond his domain. He might as well sit back and enjoy the show, just like any other spectator. A few years…
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How Dunkirk Saved the Jews
Each time the anniversary of the evacuation from Dunkirk and the fall of France comes round, more paeans of praise are written about the “miraculous” escape. But those eulogizing both the bravery on the beaches and the men who manned those celebrated little ships rarely stop to mention the consequences that would have followed if…
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A Triumvirate of Evil
If Roman Polanski’s 2005 cinematic adaptation of “Oliver Twist” and Al Pacino’s performance as Shylock in the recent film “The Merchant of Venice” have not satisfied your cravings for Jewish malefactors, you’ll be delighted to hear that Theater for a New Audience is about to present us with a jam-packed program devoted to the upper…
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