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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Power of Speech
I don’t know about you, but I’m no fan of the sermon. Much as I try — and I do try — to pay rapt attention to the rabbi’s words, my mind tends to wander far, far away from the subject at hand or else is completely taken up with cataloging the grammatical and syntactical…
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What’s in a Home?
The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories By Ilan Stavans TriQuarterly, 144 pages, $22.95. Many of our contemporary Jewish writers use comfort to provide tension, creating characters who are often crippled, and sometimes haunted, by the relative ease of their lives. They live under the shadow of comfort’s flipside — apathy — and grapple almost exclusively…
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Dylan’s Religious Revival: Modern Times and the Timeless
What would happen if Bob Dylan released a politically potent sequel to “The Times They Are a-Changin’” complete with blistering attacks on the War on Terror, the government’s creeping encroachment upon civil liberties, and the persistence of prejudice and discrimination? Would anyone care? Probably not. Just like few have noticed Neil Young’s fierce album of…
The Latest
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Northern Exposure: Mameloshn’s Unexpected Fate – in Sweden
In the weeks leading up to Sweden’s national election this month, the government put out public service announcements in the press, encouraging its citizens to vote. But one feature was hardly standard issue: The bulletins informed the readers how to get voting instructions in Yiddish. The bulletins served as a reminder of — or, more…
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Unrest Brews at Rebbe’s Resting Place
UMAN, Ukraine – On the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the dirt roads on the northern edge of this central Ukrainian town had Jewish worshippers at every turn, transforming the site of a historic massacre into a place of dancing and prayer. The crowd — a collection of black-hatted Hasidim, tie-dyed teenagers from the West…
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September 29, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward Twenty-year-old Molly Schwartz of 209 E. 7th Street in New York City drank poison in her fiance’s Third Avenue jewelry store. Her future husband, Samuel Gilbert, said that Schwartz had come to see him at his workplace to complain that the two of them never would live a comfortable…
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America’s First Cultural Jew
Emma Lazarus has been having a good run recently. Eighteen months ago — some 117 years after her early death from Hodgkin’s disease — John Hollander’s judicious selection of her poetry demonstrated that she was one of the most talented American poets of the 19th century, and far and away the best Jewish one. And…
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Walking Away From Icons
Although artist Lazar (El) Markovich Lissitzky flirted with numerous movements — including Suprematism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl and Constructivism — to some he will always be doomed to remain the artist whose work resembles that of Marc Chagall. Many Jewish art enthusiasts, who are often prone to describe everything as Chagall-like, frequently confuse the two…
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Speakeasy Jews
In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture By Ted Merwin Rutgers University Press, 240 pages, $23.95 With its irresistible blend of innocence and envelope-pushing, the Jazz Age — an era of bootleggers, flappers and silent-movie stars — still holds a mythical fascination for today’s audiences. To this end, Ted Merwin,…
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France’s 900-page Cause Célèbre
Parisians are all in a fury, they’re reading in the streets. The newest cause célèbre of the French fall publishing season? A 900-page novel about the Holocaust, written in French by an expatriate Jewish American, 38-year-old Jonathan Littell. Titled “Les Bienveillantes,” which is said to translate, in English, to “The Well-meaning Ones” (though that’s probably…
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Matzo on the Merchandise Table
Ira Kaplan doth protest too much. The guitarist for indie rock band Yo La Tengo — a New Jersey trio known for their encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and for their jazzlike interplay — demurs when asked about his ties to Jewish tradition. “I’m not a practicing Jew,” Kaplan said, in an interview soon after…
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