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 Enduring Power of ‘Education’
My 13-year-old son, Menachem, is my valued chavruta, or study partner; he has a keen and creative mind, and I hope he will one day become a true talmid chochom, or religious scholar. We study Talmud together every evening and Sabbath; Menachem’s mornings at yeshiva are also filled with the study of religious texts. But…
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Returning to Bethlehem
THE BOOK OF RUTH IS READ ON SHAVUOT ‘We should never have left Bethlehem,” the older woman was saying. “It was bad enough when Elimelech died; what a shock to my system. I blame him for what happened to my boys. Not to mention, there was this parcel of land….” “Your boys…,” Ruth thought sadly….
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Festival Of Arts New York
It’s that time of year again. After six months of pondering, exploring and expressing the theme of “wandering,” the 27 members of Makor’s Artists-in-Residence program have created works that will be presented in the seventh Biannual Makor Marathon. As the event is a multimedia, multidisciplinary festival of visual and performing arts, its theme seems appropriate:…
The Latest
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An American Look
Styles, themes and subjects of American art created in the first half of the 20th century are examined in a traveling exhibition, My America: Art From the Jewish Museum Collection, 1900-1955. Originally organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, the show makes its way to the Bay Area, where it will be presented at the…
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Looking Back May 26, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD New York City’s East Side Pushcart Peddlers Association held meetings this week to protest the unjust way in which Jewish pushcart peddlers are being treated. They say that Jewish peddlers who request licenses are frequently turned away, whereas Christian peddlers get their licenses without a fuss. In addition, there…
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In Defense of the (High) Art of Writing
The Din in the Head By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $24. * * *| It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that any person in possession of a large personal library will covet, if he or she does not already own, essays written by Cynthia Ozick. Why? Because Ozick’s paragraphs contain equal measures…
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Amid the Smokestacks, An American Dream
Now You See It… Stories from Cokesville, PA By Bathsheba Monk Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages, $22. * * *| Cokesville, Pa., is a gritty fictional American shtetl. It is populated by Polish-Catholic émigrés and anchored by the steel mills in which they are employed. It is a place both defined and defeated by…
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Rivalry In the Time Of Cholera
An Imperfect Lens By Anne Roiphe Shaye Areheart Books, 304 pages, $25. * * *| Disease, horrifying as it can be in real life, usually makes for a good read — gripping, intense, fearful and always entertaining. Veteran novelist Anne Roiphe’s latest book, “An Imperfect Lens,” is a riveting work of historical fiction, taking the…
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Haunted by the Ghosts of Traumas Past
Blue Nude By Elizabeth Rosner Ballantine Books, 224 pages, $22.95. * * *| ‘In retrospect, I can see that I spent much of my childhood waiting for the war,” Eva Hoffman wrote in “After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins” (PublicAffairs, 2004), her renowned investigation of the trauma of second-generation…
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Shattering a Peaceful Facade
The Attack By Yasmina Khadra Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 272 pages, $18.95. * * *| The comparisons are inevitable, so let’s get the ball rolling: Yasmina Khadra’s new novel, “The Attack,” is a successor of sorts to the 2005 art house hit, “Paradise Now.” Like Hany Abu-Assad’s mournful, despairing film, “The Attack” is an iconoclastic Muslim…
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Beyond ‘Fear’: Tips on Chutzpah
Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life By Erica Jong Tarcher, 304 pages, $22.95. * * *| At the end of “Fear of Flying,” Erica Jong’s 1973 best-selling novel, the lead character lists potential female heroes. Simone de Beauvior? Too obsessed with Sartre. Sylvia Plath? Stuck her head in an oven. Doris Lessing? Her female…
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