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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Found in Translation
Nestled between Arab East Jerusalem, the ultra-Orthodox mecca of Meah Shearim, and the cafés and pubs of Zion Square is the neighborhood of Musrara. Fittingly, this crossroads is home to Ibis Editions, a small book press specializing in literature of the Levant, works that blur the boundaries between time, place and language. Ibis is the…
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Cracking Gum –– and Stereotypes
How This Night Is Different By Elisa Albert Free Press, 199 pages, $18. * * *| ‘In her backpack for Auschwitz, Shayna Markowitz packs the following,” begins one story in Elisa Albert’s debut fiction collection, “How This Night Is Different.” The sardonic, mischievous wit of such a line, and of the collection as a whole,…
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An Experiment Becomes a Showpiece
Something big is happening in the smallest room of the Judah L. Magnes Museum. When Alla Efimova was hired as chief curator of the Jewish art museum in 2003 — overseeing a venerable Judaica collection she calls “encyclopedic and global” — she first asked herself: “How can we renew the collection and make it relevant…
The Latest
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Rediscovering Isaac Rosenfeld
This week’s 50th yahrzeit of Isaac Rosenfeld, a brilliant and unjustly forgotten writer who belonged to a brilliant moment in American Jewish writing, offers a good occasion to measure the distance between that moment and our own. Rosenfeld’s story is a strange amalgam of success and failure. Born in Chicago, Rosenfeld was a prodigy, at…
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Filling in the Holes
Bagel boys, get ready for your close-up. Writer Matthew Goodman and veteran film director Joan Micklin Silver have begun collaborating on a documentary about the little-known history of the Local 338, the International Bagel Bakers Union of New York. The union, which was founded in 1907 and was one of the city’s most powerful in…
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Which Jewish State?
Converging Alternatives: The Bund and the Zionist Labor Movement, 1897-1985 By Yosef Gorny State University of New York Press, 309 pages, $75. If the second intifada has achieved little else, it has reawakened furious disputes over questions seemingly settled long ago. Are Jews a nation? Are they entitled to political self-determination? Does the State of…
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Turning Down the Light
When Moses is clearly told that he will not enter the Promised Land because of a momentary failure in his ministry of national leadership and service, we might wonder whether Moses is, in the end, a tragic figure. After all, he has labored to bring the people of Israel to the land in which the…
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A Different Kind Of Jewish Mother
A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous And Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted To Be a Respectable Jewish Mom), by Her Bastard Son By Clancy Sigal Carroll & Graf, 288 pages, $26. * * *| I n the past few years, there has been an impressive list of memoirs that triumphantly…
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The Rock as a Hard Place
I have always found the story of Moses in the Desert of Zin where there is no water and the well has gone dry (Numbers 20:1-12) to be knotty indeed, and the more one struggles with it, the tighter and the more uncomfortable are its bonds. We all know that Moses was supposed to talk…
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HEARTFELT DRAMA
Divorce is never a simple affair, but it’s certainly made easier when the couple is childless. The exes go their separate ways and, hopefully, find happiness and new love. However, the intriguing premise of “Hard Love,” by acclaimed Israeli playwright Motti Lerner, complicates the issue. Hannah and Hershel, two young ultra-Orthodox newlyweds, are forced into…
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MUSICAL NOSTALGIA
Set in the United States in the early 20th century, Stephen Flaherty’s 1998 Tony Award-winning musical, “Ragtime,” interweaves stories of a wealthy Protestant family; a poor Jewish immigrant and his daughter, and an educated black musician from Harlem, the woman he loves and their child. Based on E.L. Doctorow’s novel of the same name, the…
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