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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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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Molad
in the evening sky I caught sight of an arcing sliver of moon; I hung my hopes on that thin white ledge clinging to a larger dark circle I could discern only in outline having lost track of our time, I wondered: had the month just begun or just ended and in the coming nights…
The Latest
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June 30
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A rumor that children in New York City public schools are having their tonsils taken out in school is spreading like wildfire in the Jewish community. Although there is no truth to the allegation, hysterical crowds of screaming mothers in the Brownsville and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn went running…
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Hannah and Her Brothers
If “The First Time I Was 20” teaches viewers anything, it’s that teenage boys in the 1960s were sophisticated enough to recognize that beauty is only skin deep, and antisemitic classmates can become best pals if only they get to know the real you. In short, Lorraine Levy’s wisp of a movie, in French with…
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Spinoza: Hero, Infidel, Celebrity
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity By Rebecca Goldstein Nextbook/Schocken, 304 pages, $19.95. * * *| Betrayal haunts the image of 17th-century philosopher Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza like no other Jewish historical celebrity. For centuries, the name of this radical pantheist, pioneering biblical critic and defector from Judaism — once described as “the…
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…and Muse
Conversation With Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel By Goce Smilevski Translated by Filip Korzenski Northwestern University Press, 152 pages, $16.95. * * *| A few centuries too late, it seems that Spinoza’s time has finally come. In a world in which many Jews are yet again attempting to assert a secular identity as the dialectic antipode…
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A Painter on Earth Whose Brush Reaches the Heavens
‘I cannot imagine German culture without Judaism,” painter Anselm Kiefer said. “One thing is that Germans committed the immense crime of killing Jews. The other is that they amputated themselves. They took half of German culture and killed it.” As a result, Kiefer, who was born to Catholic parents in Donaueschingen, Germany, during the final…
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Fateful Correspondence
Paper Kisses: A True Love Story By Reinhard Kaiser Translated by Anthea Bell Other Press, 120 pages, $13.95. * * *| Like Reinhard Kaiser, the author of “Paper Kisses” — a true, epistolary tale of two star-crossed lovers during the Holocaust — my father was a collector of stamps. And like Kaiser, his hobby was…
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Magen David: Shield or Star?
Chalk up a victory for the Star of David — or, as it is called in Hebrew, the magen David or “Shield of David.” Long boycotted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which refused to grant Israel’s “Red Shield of David” organization membership in its ranks because it did not recognize the medical…
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Korah; or, the Possibility of Change
This week’s Torah portion, Korah, tells a spectacular story of rebellion and punishment. Korah challenges Moses and Aaron’s rule with a deceptively simple argument: “All of the community is holy.… What makes you so special that you raise yourselves up?” (Numbers 16:3) Coming as it does from his very own tribe, Moses falls into despair….
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