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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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…
The Latest
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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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METROPOLITAN NEW YORK
Exhibit ‘Layers of Time’: Artist Marty Greenbaum’s series of colorful mixed media, titled Recent Work: Layers of Time, is presented in a group exhibition at the Safe-T-Gallery in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood. Greenbaum’s work appears with pieces by artists Daniel Blochwitz, Susan Bowen, Roger Bruhn and Burst387. Safe-T-Gallery, 11 Front St., Ste 214, Brooklyn; through July…
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YIDDISH IN THE PARK
Some people run away to the Hamptons or to the Jersey shore to escape the hazy, hot, humid summers typical of New York City. But those of us who stick around these concrete islands enjoy a number of seasonal benefits, not the least of which are the free outdoor concerts that dot the city’s public…
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Molad
in the evening sky I caught sight of an arcing sliver of moon; I hung my hopes on that thin white ledge clinging to a larger dark circle I could discern only in outline having lost track of our time, I wondered: had the month just begun or just ended and in the coming nights…
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June 30
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A rumor that children in New York City public schools are having their tonsils taken out in school is spreading like wildfire in the Jewish community. Although there is no truth to the allegation, hysterical crowds of screaming mothers in the Brownsville and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn went running…
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Hannah and Her Brothers
If “The First Time I Was 20” teaches viewers anything, it’s that teenage boys in the 1960s were sophisticated enough to recognize that beauty is only skin deep, and antisemitic classmates can become best pals if only they get to know the real you. In short, Lorraine Levy’s wisp of a movie, in French with…
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Spinoza: Hero, Infidel, Celebrity
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity By Rebecca Goldstein Nextbook/Schocken, 304 pages, $19.95. * * *| Betrayal haunts the image of 17th-century philosopher Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza like no other Jewish historical celebrity. For centuries, the name of this radical pantheist, pioneering biblical critic and defector from Judaism — once described as “the…
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…and Muse
Conversation With Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel By Goce Smilevski Translated by Filip Korzenski Northwestern University Press, 152 pages, $16.95. * * *| A few centuries too late, it seems that Spinoza’s time has finally come. In a world in which many Jews are yet again attempting to assert a secular identity as the dialectic antipode…
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