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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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…
The Latest
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Hip Hop as Conflict Resolution
CORRECTION: In the print version of this story, the Palestinian group DAM was mistakenly identified. The members are from Lod, Israel. If the only rap you’ve heard is of the gangsta variety, and the only MCs you recognize are those whose mug shots you’ve seen on television, you’re not likely to think of hip hop…
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One Rapper Who Can’t Seem To Blend In
Yitzchak Jordan can’t seem to blend in. In the Baltimore Baptist church he occasionally attended as a child, his passion for Judaism was an oddity. Now a convert to Judaism, the African American rapper known as Y-Love feels at home in the Hasidic community of Brooklyn’s Flatbush area, but his dark skin and leftwing politics…
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Kafka in the Countryside
The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka By Franz Kafka, with commentary by Roberto Calasso Translated by Michael Hofmann Schocken Books, 160 pages, $15.95. In the summer of 1917, Franz Kafka suffered the first symptoms of tuberculosis. Paradoxically enough, the onset of the disease liberated him. It freed him from his agonized and agonizing engagement to…
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How ‘Fiddler’ Became Folklore
Last February, I attended the Bet Shira Congregation in Miami during the synagogue’s official celebration of Tu B’Shvat, or the New Year for Trees. Festivities for this particular Jewish holiday usually involve the planting of trees, a discussion about the environment or some other similarly agriculturally themed event. But at Bet Shira, synagogue president Ron…
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September 1, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward “We’re the orphans from the pogroms, and we want to see the editors of the Forward,” said one member of a group of six girls and a boy, refugees from the recent attacks in Bialystok, when they appeared in the offices of the paper. But when asked to tell…
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Happy Is as Happy Does
Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story By Rachel Kadish Houghton Mifflin, 336 pages, $24. Amid the otherwise maudlin confessions of her 1994 best-seller, “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America” (also published by Houghton Mifflin), Elizabeth Wurtzel stumbled on a happy insight: Tolstoy’s famous first line from “Anna Karenina” — “Happy families are all alike; every…
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A Century Later, A Jewish Pioneer Gets His Due
Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer By C. S. Monaco Louisiana State University Press, 264 pages, $44.95. Moses Levy has waited more than100 years for his biographer. Levy died in 1854, virtually unnoticed. Pilgrimage, his utopian colony in Florida and the first Jewish communitarian settlement in the United States, was long gone…
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A Different Kind of Kosher
Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 By Anna Shternshis Indiana University Press, 248 pages, $24.95. In the opening pages of her new book, “Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939,” Anna Shternshis introduces us to Sara F., an elderly Soviet Jewish émigré living in Brooklyn. Born…
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