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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Jacob’s Finale
This final portion of Genesis is chiefly concerned with Jacob’s preparations for his approaching death. These occupy three successive scenes. In the first he has Joseph, in private, swear to bury him, not in Egypt where he will die, but in the burial place of his fathers in Canaan. In the second, again in private…
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January 13, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Most of the tenants of a tenement on Manhattan’s Chrystie Street confuse the names of two of the other residents: Rosenthal, the watchmaker, and Rosenblum, the building super. But the two men couldn’t be more different. When Rosenthal hung a fine-looking sign on his door advertising his watch repair…
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La Petite Jerusalem
Religious practice, especially of the Jewish kind, is often an iffy matter on screen. As dramatized in such recent films as “A Stranger Among Us” and “A Price Above Rubies,” Orthodox Judaism is rendered tantalizingly foreign. When the modern world intrudes in these films, as it inevitably does, the result is a clash of matter…
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The Chosen People
Give Igal Hecht credit for trying. Making a movie about theology is tricky enough; making one about a fringe theology requires a miracle. In his ambitious but frustrating documentary, the Canadian filmmaker has taken on that perpetual urban curiosity, Jews for Jesus. By the choice of subject, one expects a flurry of proselytizing and street-side…
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Love Iranian-American Style
In “Love Iranian-American Style,” director Tanaz Eshaghian tackles the subject of marriage in the Persian-American community, where she interrogates, challenges and otherwise needles her relatives over their views on coupling. The Eshaghians fled the ayatollah’s brutal regime after the 1979 revolution, but the totalitarians they left behind need not worry; Eshaghian’s questioning might be considered…
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December 30, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Max Cohen, a 21-year-old resident of New York City’s Harlem area, was arrested on the charge of burglary. He stands accused of robbing more than 30 homes in a unique way: by posing as a window shade repairman. When Cohen appeared at the door of the Holland home, he…
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Iron-fisted in Politics, Velvet-gloved in Fiction
The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn-of-the-Century Odessa Vladimir Jabotinsky, translated from the Russian by Michael R. Katz Cornell University Press, 203 pages, $17.95. * * *| The tradition of the statesman-writer is one with a long history — particularly in Britain, where Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill (winner of the 1953 Nobel…
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Reading Kafka’s Love Letters as a Key to His Mind
Kafka: The Decisive Years By Reiner Stach, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Harcourt, 592 pages, $35. * * *| ‘I am nothing, absolutely nothing,” declared Franz Kafka, who longed to contract his life into a perfect sentence. Eighty-one years after his death, we’ve got plenty of nothing. Posthumous publication of thousands of pages…
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When The Streets Were Paved With Tragedy
Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced Into Prostitution in the Americas By Isabel Vincent William Morrow, 288 pages, $25.95. * * *| Memory is a central concept in Judaism. When someone dies, we say that he or she lives on in how he or she is remembered by others. Countless…
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An Israeli Filmmaker Finds an Unlikely Muse
What do “Easy Rider,” Johnnie Walker, Walt Disney and the State of Israel have in common? Allow me to introduce Ami Ankilewitz. Born in Laredo, Texas, Ankilewitz was diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy as an infant, and his mother was told that he would not live past the age of 6. Now…
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Fortunately Unfortunately
Joseph dreams and interprets dreams that are understood to be communications from God. They foretell God’s intention and move God’s narrative forward. If we want to look for human motive, we had better do it in the form of suppositions: Was it innocence, was it a phenomenal lack of tact, or was it testosterone that…
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