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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Walking Away From Icons
Although artist Lazar (El) Markovich Lissitzky flirted with numerous movements — including Suprematism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl and Constructivism — to some he will always be doomed to remain the artist whose work resembles that of Marc Chagall. Many Jewish art enthusiasts, who are often prone to describe everything as Chagall-like, frequently confuse the two…
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Speakeasy Jews
In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture By Ted Merwin Rutgers University Press, 240 pages, $23.95 With its irresistible blend of innocence and envelope-pushing, the Jazz Age — an era of bootleggers, flappers and silent-movie stars — still holds a mythical fascination for today’s audiences. To this end, Ted Merwin,…
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France’s 900-page Cause Célèbre
Parisians are all in a fury, they’re reading in the streets. The newest cause célèbre of the French fall publishing season? A 900-page novel about the Holocaust, written in French by an expatriate Jewish American, 38-year-old Jonathan Littell. Titled “Les Bienveillantes,” which is said to translate, in English, to “The Well-meaning Ones” (though that’s probably…
The Latest
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Matzo on the Merchandise Table
Ira Kaplan doth protest too much. The guitarist for indie rock band Yo La Tengo — a New Jersey trio known for their encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and for their jazzlike interplay — demurs when asked about his ties to Jewish tradition. “I’m not a practicing Jew,” Kaplan said, in an interview soon after…
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Soldier GirI
In the comic-book frame, we can see the heroine: a squat, somewhat disheveled contrast to the smooth, self-possessed Israeli soldiers by whom she is surrounded. Her eyes, etched with a couple of ink dashes, nevertheless betray both vulnerability and alienation. Peering out of a pouchy Ashkenazic face, they seek out friendship, sex and acceptance from…
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September 22, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward Poultry dealer Morris Frank was hauling a large truckload of chickens in New York City from Harlem to Hester Street, to be used as kapores (sacrifices) for Yom Kippur. The overloaded truck was whizzing down Central Park West when suddenly it smashed into a trolley car at 69th Street….
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Blitzkrieg Flop
The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: a secret History of Jewish Punk By Steven Lee Beeber Chicago Review Press, 272 pages, $24.95. By turns entertaining and infuriating, Steven Lee Beeber’s “The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s” is a study in contradictions: Rarely have so many carefully researched facts been placed in service of such deeply flawed arguments. Beeber’s basic…
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A Jew Walks Into a Bar…
Yes, but Is It Good for the Jews? By Jonny Geller Bloomsbury, 208 pages, $15.95. “Our Pal, G-d” and Other Presumptions: A Book of Jewish Humor By Jeffry V. Mallow iUniverse, Inc. 192 pages, $16.95. Oy! The Ultimate Book of Jewish Jokes By David Minkoff St. Martin’s Press, 432 pages, $22.95. Funny is hard. Everyone…
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Jazzing Up Ancient Texts
In 2000, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb had just moved to Boston from Israel to attend the New England Conservatory when she received a care package from her mother. In it was a copy of ShirHaShirim, one of the five scrolls that constitute the third book of the Tanach. Many believe that King Solomon, born in Jerusalem…
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Reassessing FDR’s Legacy
In his counterfactual vision of the United States during World War II, “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth imagines a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator turned America Firster and Nazi sympathizer. President Lindbergh soon signs a nonaggression pact with Hitler, and pogroms and…
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New Book Incites Scholarly Fracas
As a book that that seeks to upend commonly held historical notions, Robert N. Rosen’s “Saving the Jews” is by its very nature a combative work. But even by Rosen’s standards, his 17th chapter is a confrontational one. It is here that he engages FDR’s detractors most directly, in language that prompted 55 scholars to…
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