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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Looking Back May 19, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD After nearly 14 years in conditions worse than those of Alfred Dreyfus on Devil’s Island, anarchist Alexander Berkman finally has been freed. He was met by a small group of close friends who took him to Chicago and then to St. Louis, where he plans to settle. On his…
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Dissecting the Body and Soul of the Common Man
Everyman By Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, 192 pages, $24. * * *| My grandmother Rebecca lived to 100, but, as was typical for a person of her time and place, from an early age she witnessed severe illness. Born on the outskirts of Vilna, she arrived at Ellis Island in 1901 as a young woman,…
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Lust, Faith and Phylacteries
‘Mendy: A Question of Faith” is cinematic proof that putting faith and sex in a movie doesn’t make the film about religion, and doesn’t necessarily make it sexy. In this cheesily staged feature, which is showing through May 26 at Cinema Village in Manhattan, the titular character (Ivan Sandomire) is a Satmar Hasid who has…
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Jewish Life Under the Microscope
Video can be a harsh, unforgiving and literal medium. But Israeli artist Michal Rovner’s work is refreshingly distinct from much of the contemporary crop of edgy video art that is designed to offend and upset. In Fields, her current exhibit at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, she has transformed the medium into a subtle…
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Adventures in the American Southwest
They lived the adventure, excitement and dangers of the Southwest frontier. Outside of Pueblo, Colo., 5-year-old Clara Goldsmith was kidnapped by Indians and traded back to her anxious father, Henry, for some calico, flour and hickory; teenage Levi Herzstein was gunned down in 1896 by Thomas “Black Jack” Ketchum, New Mexico’s most notorious outlaw at…
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French Writers’ New Renaissance
In Lieu of Memory: Contemporary Jewish Writing in France By Thomas Nolden Syracuse University Press, 264 pages, $29.95. * * *| I n the novels of Patrick Modiano, one of his famous peers, a leading French Jewish writer once told me to look for something: telephone books. The advice seemed strange at the time: What…
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Woman of Letters, Woman of the World
‘Femme de lettres” — “woman of letters” — is how Sybille Bedford once listed her profession on a customs form, following a conceit suggested to her by Aldous Huxley years before she found success as a writer of travelogues, novels and court-trial journalism. But in truth, Bedford — a renowned novelist, journalist and biographer who…
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Cycles of Poverty
WASHINGTON, D.C. —A woman holding a placard stating “Behar, Leviticus 25” marched down the center aisle of the United States Senate, disrupting this afternoon’s session. As Senators scurried to hide beneath their seats, the protester paced before the podium for five minutes until Capitol police, guns drawn, surrounded her. Only after one Izzy Cohen, a…
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Putting Together the Pieces of a Sculptor’s Life and Work
Rebecca Spence For the first 10 years of artist Eva Hesse’s life, her father, Wilhelm, recorded in a series of painstakingly detailed diaries the everyday events that constituted her childhood. Interweaving photographs, text and newspaper clippings, his artfully collaged books — known in German as tägebucher — were intended to serve as a legacy for…
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The End of the World as We Know It
Lenny Bruce Is Dead By Jonathan Goldstein Counterpoint, 193 pages, $13. Lenny Bruce died in 1966 at the age of 40, from a morphine overdose in his home in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. Like Elvis would a little more than a decade later, Bruce died in the bathroom, which is both funny…
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KGB Confidential: Unearthing a Hero of Soviet Jewry
There is a long-standing tradition among the Russian intelligentsia of honoring one’s intellectual heroes by prominently displaying their image for all to see. In a place where others might put family portraits, the Russian physicist has a photo of the professor who trained him; the poet stares up at Mandelstam or Brodsky. When I went…
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