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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Books Roundup
Each season brings a slew of Holocaust-related books, but the spring 2006 line seems to be a particularly rich crop, including tales of personal heroism in the face of extreme danger; historical documents on Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt, and even a book of poems that envisions Franz Kafka had he lived to…
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Looking Back April 21, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Thousands of people are dead or wounded after an earthquake destroyed the city of San Francisco. Most of the city’s buildings collapsed and are now in flames. Smaller buildings were mostly made of wood and also have gone up in flames. The fires cannot be extinguished because the city’s…
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Folk or Not, Sephardic Music for the Ages
Just because something’s common doesn’t mean it’s easy. Classical composers, for example, have long mined folk music for inspiration: Brahms had a thing for German folk tunes, Chopin made the Polish mazurka a mainstay of Romantic piano literature and Bartok built much of his music atop a foundation of Magyar folk song. But turning folk…
The Latest
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Looking Back April 14, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD All Jewish immigrants in New York know there are circumstances that force those in transit to remain in custody on Ellis Island for certain periods of time. Sometimes it is because they are ill, other times it is due to the fact that they do not have enough money…
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Miami Vice Versa
Saving South Beach By M. Barron Stofik University Press of Florida, 336 pages, $27.95. * * *| Miami’s South Beach neighborhood is an urban icon. Bringing new meaning to the term multicultural, South Beach is one of the only places in the United States where a twenty-something can have morning coffee with Grandma and her…
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A Crowd of Voices Covers a Folk Legend
In last year’s “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,” filmmaker Lian Lunson pays homage to the man often considered the Canadian equivalent of Bob Dylan by filming a succession of performers singing Cohen’s songs, in scenes that emphasize just how beautiful his songs are when sung by someone else. When Cohen sings his own works —…
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State of Emergency: The Demise of Secularism
The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously By Jacques Berlinerblau Cambridge University Press, 232 pages, $19.99. * * *| God, it turns out, is not dead, but secularism might be — unless it deigns to take another look at itself, at God and at God’s book, and seeks to study and know what…
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From the Stage To the Page
Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays Edited by Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnick Foreword by Theodore Bikel University of Texas Press, 587 pages, $24.95. * * *| Published plays — especially those in anthologies — tend to be dismissed by the casual browser as specialty items, of interest only to students of theater history or to actors…
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A Lebanese Writer’s Palestinian Story
Elias Khoury has enough to deal with in his hometown. The editor in chief of the weekly literary supplement of An Nahar, the secular, leftist Beirut daily, recently lost two colleagues: columnist Samir Kassir and publisher Gebran Tueni, both of whom were presumably murdered by the Syrian government. “Everybody like me — intellectuals who are…
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A ‘Matzo’ Mystery
We’re all eating it this week — in some cases, more than we’d like to — but why on earth do we spell it “matzo,” or “matzoh”? What Jew says, or ever did say, “mah-tso,” pronouncing the last syllable to rhyme with “oh” or “glow”? Ashkenazic Jews always have said “MAH-tse,” with the last syllable…
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Is God Just?
The portion read on the intermediate Shabbat of Pesach, Exodus 33:12-34:26, contains some of the most extraordinary passages in the Torah. Moses asks God to “show me now Thy ways, that I may know Thee” (Exodus 33:13) and gets the comforting response, “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest.” But…
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