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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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…
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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…
The Latest
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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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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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My Friends and Me
Friendship: An Exposé By Joseph Epstein Houghton Mifflin, 288 pages, $24. ‘What really knocks me out,” Holden Caulfield says in “The Catcher in the Rye,” “is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on…
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Israeli Dance Invades Lincoln Center Fest
The Lincoln Center Festival, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, showcases globally diverse artistic troupes that have distinctive performance styles. In keeping with that ideal, Nigel Redden, the festival’s director, has booked performances by three contemporary Israeli dance companies that represent the vivid intensity and cerebral creativity emerging from Israel’s choreographers. On July 12, Emanuel…
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The Ghosts of Alfred Dreyfus
On July 12, France will celebrate the centennial of the acquittal of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer whose false indictment on a charge of treason set off a political scandal in the country. In a certain light, it would seem that the Dreyfus Affair — and the environment in which it emerged — has…
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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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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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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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