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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ROOFTOP RENAISSANCE
251 West 100th Street, New York, N.Y., 212-865-0600. Scribblers on the Roof: Contemporary American Jewish Fiction Edited by Melvin Jules Bukiet and David G. Roskies Persea Books, 352 pages, $15.95. * * *| At the turn of the past century, New York City’s Lower East Side was more crowded than Calcutta, and out of that…
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Taking Care of Husbands
A husband suspects his wife of adultery, a capital crime. He takes her before the priest, who makes her drink a witches’ brew of holy water and dust from the tabernacle floor. She makes a solemn declaration: If she is innocent, the bitter water will have no effect, but if guilty, she will experience acute…
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A History Of Style
Vogue magazine did not exist in the 15th century, but this didn’t stop Europeans of that era from keeping up to date on cutting-edge trends in clothing and fashion. Curious about the customs of people living in other parts of the world, early modern Europeans read costume books and travelogues that had images depicting styles…
The Latest
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June 9
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Phoebe Cohen came to New York from Liverpool, England, to find her father — and have him arrested for abandoning his wife and family. Though she searched high and low for him, she wasn’t able to find him until, purely by chance, she saw Brooklyn resident Max Cohen on…
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Looking Back June 2, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD It’s a known fact that many young sweatshop workers are terribly jealous of Singer sewing machine agents, who make good money, are well dressed and perform work that doesn’t seem very strenuous. But the reality is that they are enslaved to the company. Though it seems like they’re partners,…
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Searching for Answers, After the Fire
Triangle By Katharine Weber Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $23. * * *| ‘Triangle” is a prose cousin of certain one-act plays, those taut dramatic exercises in which just a few characters, engaging in conversation, conjure grand notions. (Think of “No Exit,” “Waiting for Godot,” “Doubt.”) At its best, Katharine Weber’s new novel has…
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A Very Special Episode: ‘Everwood’ Series Finale Has the Rite Stuff
The fictional television town of Everwood, Colo., has no synagogue and no rabbi, not even a fictional one. Its leading citizen is played by the palpably WASPy Treat Williams, and its network — The WB — gave birth to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Beauty and the Geek.” So it might be the last place,…
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Good Guys and Bad Guys
Who are the good guys? That’s what every well-meaning European, left-wing European, intellectual European, liberal European always wants to know, first and foremost. Who are the good guys in the film and who are the bad guys. In this respect Vietnam was easy: The Vietnamese people were the victims, and the Americans were the bad…
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The Enduring Power of ‘Education’
My 13-year-old son, Menachem, is my valued chavruta, or study partner; he has a keen and creative mind, and I hope he will one day become a true talmid chochom, or religious scholar. We study Talmud together every evening and Sabbath; Menachem’s mornings at yeshiva are also filled with the study of religious texts. But…
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Returning to Bethlehem
THE BOOK OF RUTH IS READ ON SHAVUOT ‘We should never have left Bethlehem,” the older woman was saying. “It was bad enough when Elimelech died; what a shock to my system. I blame him for what happened to my boys. Not to mention, there was this parcel of land….” “Your boys…,” Ruth thought sadly….
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Festival Of Arts New York
It’s that time of year again. After six months of pondering, exploring and expressing the theme of “wandering,” the 27 members of Makor’s Artists-in-Residence program have created works that will be presented in the seventh Biannual Makor Marathon. As the event is a multimedia, multidisciplinary festival of visual and performing arts, its theme seems appropriate:…
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