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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Klezmer in the East Looks to the West for Guidance
Midway through its hauntingly minimalist performance on the opening night of Moscow’s second-annual klezmer festival, the vocal quartet Ashkenazim took a dramatically long pause to introduce the song “Dem Shokhens Meydl.” The group’s tenor, Alina Ivakh, explained that song is an allegorical tale of two young pioneer girls — the Soviet version of Girl Scouts…
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Jewish Mobsters Amble From Text to the Panel
With 8 million stories in the Jewish naked city, artists Joe Kubert, Neil Kleid and Jake Allen have given us two riveting ones. With the growing interest in graphic novels and the pictorial evocation of historical events, it’s not surprising that more and more Jewish tales are ending up in panels instead of in type….
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Immersion in Reality
The mikveh attendant in a town where I often visit but do not live was always the same: towheaded, horsy wig, vast muumuu, thick accent and brusque, brusque, brusque. Her job was to assist women preparing for ritual immersion in observance of the ambitiously named Laws of Family Purity. Assistance is necessary because these laws,…
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Reconnoitering Translations
In the view of many biblical scholars, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, the fact-finding expedition narrated in Numbers 13-14 is a composite account from several sources. In the first, Caleb is among the scouts sent by Moses to the Promised Land, but only as far north as Hebron; Caleb alone remains loyal to God when his…
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This Magic Moment
Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era By Ken Emerson Viking Press, 320 pages, $25.95. * * *| Strange to say, there was a world before Clear Channel, Sirius and XM, before niche marketing and consolidation, before the hard-edged distinction between golden oldies (your parents’ music) and classic…
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Memorializing a Crime of Monumental Proportions
No one would say it’s an easy task to memorialize and document atrocity. Take the example of the Holocaust museum. The curator must find new ways of evoking the stench of death, the ruthless efficiency of the killing machine and the unfathomably high number of murdered families (at Auschwitz, those mountains of shoes and eyeglasses…
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Osirak, 25 Years Later
Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the Osirak bombing, when Israeli fighter planes bombed a French-built nuclear plant near Baghdad. The destruction of the near-completed reactor, which Israel believed was designed to make nuclear weapons to destroy Israel, was met with strong denunciation from the world community. A quarter-century later — with Iraq’s potential…
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Dumb Luck
On my way to Moscow last September, I stopped off in the Ukraine. Since I was going in that direction anyway, I wanted to take a look at my mother’s hometown. The town is called Murafa, and it is a very small town, not even a dot on most maps. If, by some chance, you…
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The Whole Story on Being Half-Jewish
Half/Life: Jewish Tales From Interfaith Homes Edited by Laurel Snyder Soft Skull Press, 280 pages, $14.95. * * *| Much has been written about intermarriage in America, from informal polls and academic research to vituperative op-eds and book-length explorations. And yet, a surprisingly small portion of this literature actually documents the stories and voices of…
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What’s in This Name?
Paul Baron writes in an e-mail: “Ikh bin a higer geborener un ikh bin fier un akhtzig yor alt. [I was born in this country and I’m 84 years old.] My father came from what is now Lithuania. He told me that his father, my grandfather, was a shafer (with the ‘a’ pronounced ‘ah’) and…
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The Clouds Lift
‘Y know Torah, Leah Kleinbaum?’ “There was a time.” Leah sighs at this Yiddish-speaking stranger on her doorstep. Only three weeks here and already half of Haifa knows she’s a widow just arrived from Kiev. Who is this man? A farkakte suitor? More chins than she can count, and look how he leans on that…
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