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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Women Ending Badly
Jackpot By Tsipi Keller Spuyten Duyvil, 224 pages, $13. Retelling By Tsipi Keller Spuyten Duyvil, 288 pages, $14. Readers of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” always know that Raskolnikov committed murder, but they often don’t know whether Raskolnikov knows that he committed murder. It is in this wonderful vagary, more than among any writerly tricks of…
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Cruise Control
Imagine the perfect cruise — surrounded by peaceful waters, drifting past ancient towns, atmospheric music playing in the background. Now, if those waters and towns are Ukrainian, and that music you’re imagining is klezmer, have we got a cruise for you. In April 2007 (if all goes according to plan), a boat of 150 Jewish…
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Thinking Past the Nazis
Berlin Childhood Around 1900 By Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland Harvard University Press, 208 pages, $14.95. If you have ever heard of the great German literary critic and theorist Walter Benjamin, you probably know something of his suicide. In 1940, Benjamin tried to flee from France to Spain, only to be turned back with…
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Beyond the Noise: Exploring the U.S.-Saudi Relationship
*Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership With Saudi Arabia By Rachel Bronson Oxford University Press, 384 pages, $28. In her new book, “Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership With Saudi Arabia,” scholar Rachel Bronson fires an opening shot by asserting that “recent books seem more intent on feeding public outrage than on seriously probing the…
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A Driving Force in Jewish Life
Much has been written of late about the Interstate highway system, which celebrated its 50th birthday just last month. A legacy of the 1950s, along with Elvis Presley and Lawrence Welk, the Montgomery bus boycott and the atom bomb, its 47,000 miles of roadways transformed the American landscape and modern American life in equal measure….
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Redemption Song
***A Woman in Jerusalem By A.B. Yehoshua Translated by Hillel Halkin Harcourt, 256 pages, $25. *** When it comes to literature about terrorism, the world is catching up with Israel. Since September 11, 2001, novels like “Saturday” by best-selling British author Ian McEwan, and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by young American writer Jonathan Safran…
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You Are, Therefore I Am
Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics By Samuel Moyn Cornell University Press, 268 pages, $29.95. Humanism of the Other By Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Nidra Poller University of Illinois Press, 136 pages, $18. The belief in the human soul is perhaps the most enduring remnant of traditional religion. Even those who…
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Making Old Music Seem Very New Again
For most people, the past is an undiscovered country, a place we choose not to visit in our haste to get from the present to the future. For pianist Anthony Coleman, however, it’s an artistic goldmine. When Coleman’s former teacher, Jaki Byard, died under mysterious circumstances in 1999 — shot by an unknown assailant in…
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A Cornerless World
a man in a room with a tallis on By Aaron E. Bulman Flannel Press, 125 pages, $10. * * *| The talmudist, the Yiddishist and the yeshiva boy — three characters that could easily be written as relics of a past age. But when they appear in Aaron E. Bulman’s poetry collection, “a man…
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The SS Disaster
Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust By Sara A. Ogilvie and Scott Miller University of Wisconsin Press, 192 pages, $21.95. * * *| In the years after the MS St. Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany onboard, was denied entrance to Cuba and the United States in June…
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Translating Torah
Of all the devarim — “words” or, more generally, “things” — in the Book of Devarim, or Deuteronomy, few attract less notice than the first five verses. Often set apart as a separate, and introductory, paragraph in modern translations, these verses — as opaque in their syntax as they are in their geographical references —…
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