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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A New Name for an Old Crime
Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe By Benjamin Lieberman Ivan R. Dee, 416 pages, $27.50. * * *| While Serb paramilitaries were driving Muslims from their homes in Bosnia during the spring of 1992 in an effort to rid the region of its “Muslim fundamentalist” population, Serb radio stations proudly coined…
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Understanding the Philosopher of Auschwitz
Adorno By Stefan Müller-Doohm; translated by Rodney Livingstone Polity Press, 667 pages, $75. * * *| Adorno: A Political Biography By Lorenz Jäger; translated by Stewart Spencer Yale University Press. 248 pages. $35. * * *| Although Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the two most prominent German philosophers of the postwar period (the other…
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Tracing the History of Jewish Autobiography
Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography By Marcus Moseley Stanford University Press, 650 pages, $70. * * *| ‘This is the Life Story of Judah Aryeh…. Few and evil have been the days of my life in this world… on Monday the 28th day of Nissan — corresponding to the 23d day of…
The Latest
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Sex, Lies and the German Occupation
The Mercy Room By Gilles Rozier Little, Brown and Company, 192 pages. $22.95. * * *| The scaffolding of Gilles Rozier’s taut, affecting novel, “The Mercy Room,” has all the makings of a Sunday evening television melodrama. The scene: a small town in France during the German Occupation. The hero and narrator: a French Christian…
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Revisiting the Work of the First Emancipated German Jewish Artist
When Max Liebermann premiered “The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple With the Scholars” — a historical painting based on the New Testament’s description of Jesus Christ debating with the rabbis in Jerusalem — at the 1879 Munich International Art Fair, the work was assailed by German critics. What right, after all, did a Jewish artist…
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A Texan Cantor Infuses Jewish Music With New Orleans Flavor
Austin, Texas, bills itself as the live-music capital of the world. But in a city usually known for its rock beat and country twang, Cantor Neil Blumofe has begun an exploration of Jewish music and themes played in a jazz idiom. His new CD, “Piety and Desire” — released on Valentine’s Day — looks at…
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Jerry Lewis at 80
This may be hard to believe, but Jerry Lewis turns 80 on March 16. For more than 60 years, Lewis has loomed in our collective pop culture imagination as the perpetual “kid,” the 9-year-old “nudnik” to America: carrying on, driving us crazy, making us laugh — and wince. Whether you love or hate Lewis —…
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The Shadow That Never Went Away
Yaacov Herzog: A Biography By Michael Bar-Zohar Gardners Books, 384 pages, $27.10 * * *| If the Oedipal complex didn’t exist, we might have to invent it to explain the frustrated, stunted career of Yaacov Herzog. A shadow hovered over him from the day he was born — his father, Isaac Halevi Herzog, was the…
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Skilled Craftsmen
Urim and Thummim. The ineffable name of God was inscribed on some unknown material and placed in the fold of the breastplate. — Soncino Chumash —So what we’re making is the breastplate, the ephod…. —What’s an ephod? —Like the linen apron you hang the breastplate over…? —Oh, right. —… the robe, tunic, mitre and a…
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Reminders of the Lost Ark
Jonathan, a member of Temple Har Zion’s New Building Committee, has accepted the assignment of developing a design approach for its new ark. Jonathan figures that he might as well start at the beginning and be as authentic as possible, so he types “ark of the covenant” into his computer’s Internet search engine. He is…
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Focus on HBO
Next week, one of television’s most acclaimed series returns for its final season. In its success, “The Sopranos” has joined a family of contemporary American icons, all presented by one channel: Home Box Office. In fact, when veteran journalist Michael Kinsley went looking for America’s Jane Austen —“Where in America is the essence of our…
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