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 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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Clothes Maketh the Man?
In a great metropolis, two gentlemen meet outside a large store that specializes in photographic and video equipment. They are both dressed soberly, one in the familiar navy-blue business suit, the other in a black caftan and a round cap with a thick fur brim and old-fashioned shoes, as well. Yehuda: Naftali! How are you?…
The Latest
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Video Artist Presents a Reinterpretation of Scripture
It takes some kind of chutzpah to announce at your wedding that you’re going to rewrite Deuteronomy because you find it offensive. But what kind of person turns such a wedding proclamation into an art exhibit? Melissa Shiff — a postmodern Canadian Jewish performance artist who was married by a secular humanist rabbi at a…
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CONTRASTING LANDSCAPES
Known for his bold brushstrokes and vibrant colors, Michael Kovner creates paintings that offer lush images of Israeli scenery. An expansive beach dotted with red umbrellas, piles of yellow haystacks casting moody shadows in the sunlight and a blunt portrait of a lemon tree ripe with fruit are among his subjects. In Kovner’s new exhibition,…
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Looking Back May 12, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Men, women, boys and girls appeared by the dozens at New York City’s Essex Street Police Station, carrying baskets of cats and kittens that they left in the waiting room. Little by little, the felines began to creep out of the baskets and walk around. The station’s sergeant, James…
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Nice Jewish Boy Turns Bad, Gets Role
Sometimes the most creative acting gets done off-camera. Take Scott Cohen, whom big- and small-screen audiences will recognize from the television shows “Gilmore Girls” and “Law & Order: Trial by Jury,” the film “Kissing Jessica Stein” and, most famously, “The 10th Kingdom,” NBC’s seven-hour fantasy narrative in which he played the half-man, half-wolf lead. When…
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A Witness To His Time
‘A filmmaker must be a witness of his times,” said great French director Jean-Pierre Melville, widely acknowledged as the grandfather of the French New Wave, in an interview about his 1969 movie, “Army of Shadows.” The film, a gloomy existentialist set piece of espionage that details the heroism of French partisans in the face of…
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Looking Back May 5, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD New York City’s Lower East Side has been flooded with fliers that denounce the Forward. “We Galician Jews hereby protest the Forward for the insult they printed, saying that Galitzianers are shnorrers.” The flier, which is signed by “The Committee,” demands an apology. We would like to ask just…
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Etgar Keret’s Unlikely Landscape
The Nimrod Flip-out By Etgar Keret Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 176 pages, $12. * * *| Etgar Keret’s fame in Israel is as unlikely as one of his own stories: A young writer of ultrashort, ultramodern fictions produces four straight best-selling collections. The stories in his collections go on to be translated into 16 languages…
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The Jewish Goddess, Past and Present
‘The Da Vinci Code,” soon to be a major motion picture, is an old tale in new clothing: It is the story of the goddess, sometimes referred to as the “Divine Feminine,” the female aspect of — or counterpart to — the familiar male God of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. In Dan Brown’s phenomenal…
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