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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The Wicked Witch and the Straw Man
The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred and the Jews By David Mamet Schocken, 208 pages, $19.95. The world of Jewish identity is a buyer’s market. Those of us who “do Jewish” for a living or as an avocation (rabbis, writers, editors, artists, organizational pros, philanthropists) know that half our audience is only half-interested, while the rest…
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Found in Translation: A Round-up
Language, our first barrier, now also seems our last. Babel is one bookend of human communication; today’s instantaneous transmission of Babel through a baffling array of technologies is the other. Perhaps one of the oldest occupations, after the making of towers, is translation — that utopian and often invisible task of making one word mean…
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September 15, 2006
100 Years Ago in the forward East Broadway seltzer vendor Henry Mittleman was blown to bits last week after a seltzer tank exploded in the basement of his store. Mittleman, who was working just a few feet from the tank, was thrown more than 20 feet by the blast. After he arrived at the hospital,…
The Latest
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Redrawing Family History
I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors By Bernice Eisenstein Riverhead Books, 192 pages, $23.95. Early in her new memoir, author-illustrator Bernice Eisenstein recalls the experience of having seen the 1982 Holocaust drama “Sophie’s Choice,” which arrived in theaters when she was in her early 30s. Eisenstein describes her deep, visceral response to the picture…
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Notes From the Edge
On Broadway, late summer is known as the off-season. But in the downtown theater world, life begins in August. Every year at this time, the kaleidoscopic burst of creativity known as the New York International Fringe Festival lights up Lower Manhattan. Now in its 10th year, North America’s largest multi-arts festival hosts hundreds of performances…
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As Modernity Beckoned
Ladino Rabbinic Literature & Ottoman Sephardic Culture By Matthias B. Lehmann Indiana University Press, 280 pages, $39.95. Until the end of the 15th century, the Iberian Peninsula was not only a Muslim enclave but also a site of dialogue between three religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The expulsion of Jews and Arabs irrigated their communities…
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Upstart Wineries Drench Previously Arid Country
As the war battered the prime vineyards of Israel’s cool, hilly north in Lebanon last month, Micha Vaadia, the Galil Mountain winemaker, found himself defying the army’s curfew and donning a helmet and flak jacket to inspect the growing ripeness of his grapes. His fruit survived intact, but a Lower Galilee winery, Dalton, ended up…
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Remembering Israel’s James Joyce
With the August 21 passing of Yizhar Smilansky, Israeli literature lost a voice of moral conscience and modern Hebrew lost one of its most gifted virtuosos. (He wrote under the name S. Yizhar, as he was and is universally known in common parlance as Samekh Yizhar.) Dubbed the James Joyce of Hebrew literature, Smilansky —…
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Climbing the Family Tree
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million By Daniel Mendelsohn HarperCollins, 528 pages, $27.95. Although he had begun teaching himself ancient Greek when he was 10, Daniel Mendelsohn was not interested in the Hebrew he had to memorize for his bar mitzvah in 1973, nor in the Jewish faith that the Hebrew conveyed….
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Looking Back
100 Years Ago in the Forward After a unanimous vote, all Yiddish theater companies have decided to call for a general strike in Jacob Adler’s Grand Theatre. Insiders say that it was Adler who was looking for trouble when he fired the Grand’s choir director and chose another to his liking. The Yiddish theater unions,…
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Tevye, Today and Beyond
Earlier this year, an unidentified video clip made its virtual way around the world. The recording — which soon turned up on the Web site YouTube — shows professional actors in Tokyo rehearsing “Shikitari,” or “Tradition,” the opening number in “Fiddler on the Roof.” The clip typically arrived in my email inbox accompanied by a…
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