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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October 6, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward Zipping down Manhattan’s Delancey Street from the Williamsburg Bridge, streetcar driver James Riordan saw that something was not right with Leo Schwartz, the apprentice motorman he was instructing. First, Schwartz forgot to stop the car at Broadway, even though passengers were ringing the bell. By the time the car…
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Jews in the Court
For years, it has been commonly believed that Jews were banned from England in 1290 and not allowed back until Oliver Cromwell lifted the ban in 1656. But new research, uncovered through means worthy of a first-rate detective novel, has revealed that not only were there Jews in the Britain; they were right under the…
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Ghost Town
Just how (unconsciously, breezily) Catholic is Barcelona? Contemplate, for a moment, the ultra-popular 11 a.m. Saturday exercise class led by Xavi, a step-aerobics guru at the Club Natació Atlètic-Barceloneta. Barceloneta is a beachfront neighborhood that is slightly more than 100 years old and was originally built for dockworkers — once famously painted by Picasso —…
The Latest
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Hannah Arendt, 100 Years Later
Islamic terrorism is the new totalitarianism. At least that’s the impression one gets from some Western commentators these days. In “Terror and Liberalism,” Paul Berman invoked totalitarianism in order to explain the strikingly modern ideology of Islamism. Joschka Fischer, then Germany’s foreign minister, spoke of a “third totalitarianism.” This past February, Salman Rushdie, Bernard-Henri Lévy…
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Power of Speech
I don’t know about you, but I’m no fan of the sermon. Much as I try — and I do try — to pay rapt attention to the rabbi’s words, my mind tends to wander far, far away from the subject at hand or else is completely taken up with cataloging the grammatical and syntactical…
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What’s in a Home?
The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories By Ilan Stavans TriQuarterly, 144 pages, $22.95. Many of our contemporary Jewish writers use comfort to provide tension, creating characters who are often crippled, and sometimes haunted, by the relative ease of their lives. They live under the shadow of comfort’s flipside — apathy — and grapple almost exclusively…
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Dylan’s Religious Revival: Modern Times and the Timeless
What would happen if Bob Dylan released a politically potent sequel to “The Times They Are a-Changin’” complete with blistering attacks on the War on Terror, the government’s creeping encroachment upon civil liberties, and the persistence of prejudice and discrimination? Would anyone care? Probably not. Just like few have noticed Neil Young’s fierce album of…
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Northern Exposure: Mameloshn’s Unexpected Fate – in Sweden
In the weeks leading up to Sweden’s national election this month, the government put out public service announcements in the press, encouraging its citizens to vote. But one feature was hardly standard issue: The bulletins informed the readers how to get voting instructions in Yiddish. The bulletins served as a reminder of — or, more…
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Unrest Brews at Rebbe’s Resting Place
UMAN, Ukraine – On the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the dirt roads on the northern edge of this central Ukrainian town had Jewish worshippers at every turn, transforming the site of a historic massacre into a place of dancing and prayer. The crowd — a collection of black-hatted Hasidim, tie-dyed teenagers from the West…
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September 29, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward Twenty-year-old Molly Schwartz of 209 E. 7th Street in New York City drank poison in her fiance’s Third Avenue jewelry store. Her future husband, Samuel Gilbert, said that Schwartz had come to see him at his workplace to complain that the two of them never would live a comfortable…
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America’s First Cultural Jew
Emma Lazarus has been having a good run recently. Eighteen months ago — some 117 years after her early death from Hodgkin’s disease — John Hollander’s judicious selection of her poetry demonstrated that she was one of the most talented American poets of the 19th century, and far and away the best Jewish one. And…
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