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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‘Adele’ Gets Her Close-up
Maria Altmann has had some year. On January 15 — one month before her 90th birthday — a Viennese court ordered the Republic of Austria to give up all claims to five Gustav Klimt paintings and return them to their rightful owner, Altmann and her family, who are based in Los Angeles. Then, Altmann —…
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Somewhere in Africa
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo By Peter Orner Little, Brown, 320 pages, $23.95. * * *| Larry Kaplanski’s name says it all, bringing to mind used car dealers or traveling salesmen wearing old striped shirts and older blazers, balding, doggedly fumbling for the keys to their Buick LeSabre as they move on to the…
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Sacred Massacre
The first commandment, which says God is the only God, that He is the God of the Children of Israel whom He brought out of Egypt; that we must worship no other gods and obey His laws, precedes, in order and import, the law to which intuition gives pride of place, the commandment not to…
The Latest
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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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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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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…
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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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The Least-known Modern Artist
Reading Charlotte Salomon Edited by Michael P. Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen Cornell University Press, 233 pages, $39.95. Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theater? The New Museum, Yad Vashem, June 16-October 1. * * *| Charlotte Salomon, who was murdered by the SS in 1943, is perhaps the most moving of modern artists. She is also one…
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