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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Trauma and Its Healers
Mapping Trauma and Its Wake: Autobiographic Essays By Pioneer Trauma Scholars Edited by Charles R. Figley Routledge, 272 pages, $49.95. * * *| A medical text in the “Psychosocial Stress Series” of an academic publisher would usually not interest general readers. But with aftereffects of terrorism and disaster an ongoing concern and reports surfacing of…
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Musical Tributes to Tragedy’s Victims
Music by those who perished in the Holocaust has lately enjoyed something of a vogue, with both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences discovering the work, and unfilled promise, of composers like Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, Pavel Haas and Hans Krása. But what of the music written in the aftermath the Holocaust to honor the dead? Such…
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Books Roundup
Each season brings a slew of Holocaust-related books, but the spring 2006 line seems to be a particularly rich crop, including tales of personal heroism in the face of extreme danger; historical documents on Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt, and even a book of poems that envisions Franz Kafka had he lived to…
The Latest
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Looking Back April 21, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Thousands of people are dead or wounded after an earthquake destroyed the city of San Francisco. Most of the city’s buildings collapsed and are now in flames. Smaller buildings were mostly made of wood and also have gone up in flames. The fires cannot be extinguished because the city’s…
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Folk or Not, Sephardic Music for the Ages
Just because something’s common doesn’t mean it’s easy. Classical composers, for example, have long mined folk music for inspiration: Brahms had a thing for German folk tunes, Chopin made the Polish mazurka a mainstay of Romantic piano literature and Bartok built much of his music atop a foundation of Magyar folk song. But turning folk…
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Mad About Molly
Nearly 80 years ago, one of the most popular programs in the history of broadcasting debuted. “The Goldbergs,” a long-running series — first heard on the radio and later shown on television — about a Jewish matriarch and her family, offered some audiences their first introduction via airwaves to Jews, and others an opportunity to…
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Looking Back April 14, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD All Jewish immigrants in New York know there are circumstances that force those in transit to remain in custody on Ellis Island for certain periods of time. Sometimes it is because they are ill, other times it is due to the fact that they do not have enough money…
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Miami Vice Versa
Saving South Beach By M. Barron Stofik University Press of Florida, 336 pages, $27.95. * * *| Miami’s South Beach neighborhood is an urban icon. Bringing new meaning to the term multicultural, South Beach is one of the only places in the United States where a twenty-something can have morning coffee with Grandma and her…
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A Crowd of Voices Covers a Folk Legend
In last year’s “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,” filmmaker Lian Lunson pays homage to the man often considered the Canadian equivalent of Bob Dylan by filming a succession of performers singing Cohen’s songs, in scenes that emphasize just how beautiful his songs are when sung by someone else. When Cohen sings his own works —…
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State of Emergency: The Demise of Secularism
The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously By Jacques Berlinerblau Cambridge University Press, 232 pages, $19.99. * * *| God, it turns out, is not dead, but secularism might be — unless it deigns to take another look at itself, at God and at God’s book, and seeks to study and know what…
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From the Stage To the Page
Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays Edited by Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnick Foreword by Theodore Bikel University of Texas Press, 587 pages, $24.95. * * *| Published plays — especially those in anthologies — tend to be dismissed by the casual browser as specialty items, of interest only to students of theater history or to actors…
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