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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Ron Howard’s Moving Images
The celebrity-filled Museum of the Moving Image December 4 gala salute to actor-director-producer Ron Howard was akin to a photographer-frenzied Hollywood premiere. Herbert Schlosser, museum board of trustees chairman, and Rochelle Slovin, the institution’s director, welcomed the stellar crowd at The Waldorf-Astoria. A beaming attendee was Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, in whose Astoria bailiwick…
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December 23, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A benefit was held this week at the Casino Theater to raise funds for the Jews of Russia, who have been brutally attacked, robbed and murdered. Among the major talents who participated in the benefit: famed actress Sarah Bernhardt, who showed up late and refused to sit in her…
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Israel’s Walter Cronkite Finds Himself at a Crossroads
Chaim Yavin, rightly referred to as Israel’s Walter Cronkite, has an odd face for a news anchor. Though his presence has comforted millions, delivering the news nightly on Israel’s state-run channel — with an almost exaggeratedly perfect diction — since 1968, his features seem to betray a slight befuddlement, a tinge of obliviousness. It’s not…
The Latest
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Holy Feast, Holy Fast
Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah By Joel Hecker Wayne State University Press, 296 pages, $44.95. * * *| Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture By Eliezer Diamond Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $49.95. * * *| To put it mildly, Jews have a complicated relationship…
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Yeah, but the Book Is Better
Whenever a film is adapted from a favorite novel, serious readers of fiction are prone to say, “Yeah, but the book is better.” True partisans of the written page are always in conflict with those who like their stories cinematically revealed, projected onto wide screens that illuminate the darkness and pierce the quiet with Dolby…
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Trying To Make Sephardic Music as Hip as Klezmer
Benjamin Cardozo was one. So was Benjamin Disraeli. Some believe that FDR may have been one, at least on his mother’s side. Camille Pissarro, Harold Pinter, Murray Perahia… Sephardic Jews, every one. And yet, despite their notable achievements throughout the Diaspora, Sephardim have been noticeably absent from the North American Jewish music scene. (In Israel,…
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My Little Sister’s Wedding
Why am I standing here at my little sister’s wedding, and glaring? Unlike you, Joseph’s brothers (and sister!) would have understood me. Go read Vayeshev, my favorite childhood Torah portion. I’m glaring because you stopped letting me crawl into bed with you after she was born, there not being enough room between you for two….
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The Leftmost Poets Sing Songs of Love
Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets Edited by Amelia Glaser and David Weintraub. Translated by Amelia Glaser. Illustrations by Dana Craft. University of Wisconsin Press, 192 pages, $45. * * *| Proletpen, a new anthology of American Communist Yiddish poets, is a book divided against itself. Dovid Katz’s introduction, by turns eloquent, tongue-tied, hortatory and disingenuous,…
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Wrestling
Abraham’s signature moment is his ascent of Mount Moriah to sacrifice Isaac, an extreme demonstration of obedience that few of us can contemplate without fear and dismay; Isaac’s moment is also up there on that mountain, where he realizes what is about to happen and experiences a terror that seems to be with him for…
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Back December 16, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD It is being reported that well-known Russian antisemite Nikolski, who is advising the Russian imperialists on how to handle the current upheaval, said to the tsar, “The only way to stop the revolution is to drown it in a sea of Jewish blood.” Nikolski is known to have great…
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SPIELBERG’S PREDECESSORS
“Munich” is not the first film to take on the subject of anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish terrorism. Here’s a selection of notable past works on the subject: “VISIONS OF EIGHT” (1973) — The official film of the Munich Olympics, directed by a slew of international directors, including Milos Forman, Kon Ichikawa and Arthur Penn. Surprisingly, only…
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