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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Back to Berlin
What would happen if, in our time, a German chancellor urged 6 million Jews to relocate to Germany? That is the question posed by Israel Horovitz’s play “Lebensraum,” which will enjoy a limited engagement at off-Broadway’s Kirk Theatre at Theatre Row from December 13 through December 30. In “Lebensraum,” a German chancellor does indeed make…
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Absurdity Returns to Chelm
Because Jewish folk humor depicts Chelm as a town inhabited by naive fools, few people realize that Chelm is actually a real town in Eastern Poland that was once home to 18,000 Jews and was highly regarded as a center of Torah study. Now, a half-century after nearly this whole population perished in the death…
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December 1, 2006
100 Years Agoin the forward The ladies of Manhattan’s Lower East Side are once again agitating against the meat industry, protesting high prices and boycotting butcher shops. Particularly active are local residents Esther Dolbovsky and Rebecca Reznik, who have organized a number of protests. One butcher, of Brenner’s Butcher Shop, apparently took umbrage at the…
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A Cantor’s Tale
He was a vaudeville star who was offered $100,000 to appear in Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer.” He toured North America, Europe and Palestine to tremendous acclaim, earning record fees and a kiss from Enrico Caruso. When he died in 1933, at the age of 51, more than 5,000 people attended his funeral in Israel,…
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Arts-or-Crafts
When a friend’s 4-year-old son embraced one of Ruth Duckworth’s pots and said “Mama,” the sculptor made an unusual choice: She let the name stick. Duckworth, who has always resisted labeling her pieces, now calls some of them “Mama Pots.” This was a rare concession for an artist who generally grants viewers complete interpretive control…
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Punky Town
Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 Edited by Brandon Stosuy New York University Press, 510 pages, $29.95 The day the Bowery birthplace of punk CBGB’s closed last month, New Yorkers could open their New York Times and read an obituary for it — an article whose most shocking…
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A Dance Pioneer Gets Her Due
Anna Sokolow’s name may not seem familiar, not even to diehard New Yorkers. But her legacy has been felt — directly or indirectly — by nearly every choreographer since the mid-20th century. An artist who probed deeply into social and political issues, Sokolow also demonstrated a startling versatility: as a teacher and mentor at The…
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Lighting the Way
As the days get shorter and Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, draws nearer, I’ve been thinking about illumination or, more precisely still, about electricity and its relationship to religious ritual. At first blush, electricity and religion made for unlikely companions: One, after all, was bound up with the laboratory and the process of experimentation; the…
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November 24, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward An uproar occurred this week in Russia when a reactionary newspaper printed that Prime Minister Stolipin is descended from a Jewish family. Stolipin’s grandparents were known to have been born in Galitsia, and it has definitely been determined that his great grandfather was a Jewish feldsher (medical assistant). Stolipin,…
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Pretty In Ink
Because it is really too easy to forget just how talented Jules Feiffer really is, consider the following. He has won an Academy Award (in 1961 for the animated short “Munro”) an Obie (for the 1967 play “Little Murders”) and yes, a Pulitzer Prize (in 1986 for cartoons). He wrote the screenplay for “Carnal Knowledge”…
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Spies Like Us: The Jews’ Answer to Bond
Mounted on the dashboard of my black convertible there are two plastic switches, “Grenade Launcher” and “Ejector Seat.” They amuse friends and concern wary parking lot attendants. I own high-tech gadgets ranging from a big-screen television that can do virtually everything except hover, to an IBM laptop with a Celeron processor, to the George Foreman…
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