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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Exploring the American-Israeli Alliance
Michelle Mart, a historian at Penn State University, adopts a novel approach to understanding the special relationship — a battle of “cultural narratives” within America that Israel won and the Arabs lost. In her view, an American culture in the aftermath of World War II that was truly inhospitable to antisemitism became wedded to a…
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Delving Into the Core of the Self
Yale University Press has just published “Life Is With Others,” a collection of essays written by the late Donald J. Cohen and various colleagues. Cohen, who succumbed to cancer in 2001 at the age of 61, directed the Yale Child Study Center for nearly two decades, conducted pioneering research into autism and Tourette’s Syndrome, and…
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Screening Chantal Akerman
For certain film buffs, Chantal Akerman is famous as the director of one of the screen’s most legendary endurance tests. Akerman’s masterpiece, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), as the precise title might indicate, is a remarkably focused three-and-a-half-hour study of the mundane routine of a Brussels housewife — the ultimate realist…
The Latest
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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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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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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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