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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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…
The Latest
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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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A Different Kind Of Jewish Mother
A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous And Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted To Be a Respectable Jewish Mom), by Her Bastard Son By Clancy Sigal Carroll & Graf, 288 pages, $26. * * *| I n the past few years, there has been an impressive list of memoirs that triumphantly…
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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…
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