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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September 1, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward “We’re the orphans from the pogroms, and we want to see the editors of the Forward,” said one member of a group of six girls and a boy, refugees from the recent attacks in Bialystok, when they appeared in the offices of the paper. But when asked to tell…
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Happy Is as Happy Does
Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story By Rachel Kadish Houghton Mifflin, 336 pages, $24. Amid the otherwise maudlin confessions of her 1994 best-seller, “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America” (also published by Houghton Mifflin), Elizabeth Wurtzel stumbled on a happy insight: Tolstoy’s famous first line from “Anna Karenina” — “Happy families are all alike; every…
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A Century Later, A Jewish Pioneer Gets His Due
Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer By C. S. Monaco Louisiana State University Press, 264 pages, $44.95. Moses Levy has waited more than100 years for his biographer. Levy died in 1854, virtually unnoticed. Pilgrimage, his utopian colony in Florida and the first Jewish communitarian settlement in the United States, was long gone…
The Latest
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A Different Kind of Kosher
Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 By Anna Shternshis Indiana University Press, 248 pages, $24.95. In the opening pages of her new book, “Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939,” Anna Shternshis introduces us to Sara F., an elderly Soviet Jewish émigré living in Brooklyn. Born…
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On Auction: A Bookbinder’s Private Collection of Rare Hebrew Books
On September 12, the New York-based auction house Kestenbaum & Company will open its fall 2006 season with a sale of intricately bound Hebrew books dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries. The items are from the personal library of Berlin-born Joseph Gradenwitz, who immigrated to London after fleeing Germany to escape World War…
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Dictionary Writers Hope Words Can Heal
In the south of France, two religious leaders are taking steps to heal the rifts between Jews and Muslims in their country. Rabbi Haïm Harboun and Habib S. Kaaniche, an imam, are planning to launch an unusual dictionary in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and French, followed by biographical sketches of great figures of Judaism and…
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Border Crossing and Cross-dressing
In Tomer Heymann’s new documentary, “Paper Dolls,” opening September 6 at New York’s Film Forum, viewers are introduced to a group of transvestite Filipino workers in Tel Aviv, who perform in a cross-dressing group called the Paper Dolls. But the real cross-dresser here may be Heymann, who garbs his film in one set of clothing,…
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Building a Memorial From Strands of DNA
More than six decades after the victims of the Holocaust met their fateful end, a new genetically based initiative could give some of the departed the last respects they never received. The initiative, called the DNA Shoah Project, has as its goal the identification of human remains being unearthed in European towns and cities in…
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Artist Struggles To Overcome Pain With Paint
The canvases lining Ted Meyer’s studio seem too small for their contents. The jumbled skeletons they depict, upside-down and askew, resemble boxes full of bones dug up by an archaeologist and haphazardly stowed away for later scrutiny. The paintings, from a series that Meyer has named Structural Abnormalities, are themselves artifacts from a bygone age….
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Genetic Diseases? Yes. But Must We Call Them ‘Jewish’?
The extraordinary science of genetics, which is in the process of describing the very nature of our natures, is still in its infancy. The claims made for genetics, a science as narcissistic as any infant, generally outstrip the science’s ability to define or treat genetic illnesses. Yet there is an undeniable power in the notion…
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Striking a Chord for Crohn’s Disease Research
As a member of the band Pearl Jam, the guitarist Mike McCready has played a good number of memorable concerts, but a recent show in Portland, Ore., hit especially close to home. The July 20 concert, at which Pearl Jam shared the stage with the indie-rock trio Sleater-Kinney and the comedian David Cross, was a…
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