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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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…
The Latest
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Book Kaddish
Several months ago, I happened to visit a Jewish library in New York that was located in a building adjacent to the one in which I was staying. The library still has an old-fashioned card catalog. I leafed through the cards around my family name until I came across a book by Y.M. Rubinstein. I…
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Persian Gates
Krista Nassi, an Iranian Jewish artist in her 30s, made it through Tehran’s Institute of Graphic Design and Architecture and earned a master’s degree in art from Tehran’s University of Art. But when the installation artist tried to have her work displayed in one of the state-funded archives in 2000, she was turned away. She…
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Making Old Music Seem Very New Again
For most people, the past is an undiscovered country, a place we choose not to visit in our haste to get from the present to the future. For pianist Anthony Coleman, however, it’s an artistic goldmine. When Coleman’s former teacher, Jaki Byard, died under mysterious circumstances in 1999 — shot by an unknown assailant in…
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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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The SS Disaster
Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust By Sara A. Ogilvie and Scott Miller University of Wisconsin Press, 192 pages, $21.95. * * *| In the years after the MS St. Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany onboard, was denied entrance to Cuba and the United States in June…
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Translating Torah
Of all the devarim — “words” or, more generally, “things” — in the Book of Devarim, or Deuteronomy, few attract less notice than the first five verses. Often set apart as a separate, and introductory, paragraph in modern translations, these verses — as opaque in their syntax as they are in their geographical references —…
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July 28
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD New York’s Jewish Quarter witnessed one of its most horrible scenes this week when Rebecca Greenberg, a mother of three, took her own life by slashing her throat and leaping out of a third-story window. The wife of Sam Greenberg, the woman lived with her three children, who range…
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July 21
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD This week the Forward gave away a brand-new copy of Alexander Harkavy’s English-Yiddish dictionary as a prize in the newspaper’s “Best Joke” contest. Originally the editors wanted to pick one joke as the winner, but the paper’s joke committee couldn’t decide, so they chose a final six. Among the…
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