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 ‘Matzo’ Mystery
We’re all eating it this week — in some cases, more than we’d like to — but why on earth do we spell it “matzo,” or “matzoh”? What Jew says, or ever did say, “mah-tso,” pronouncing the last syllable to rhyme with “oh” or “glow”? Ashkenazic Jews always have said “MAH-tse,” with the last syllable…
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Is God Just?
The portion read on the intermediate Shabbat of Pesach, Exodus 33:12-34:26, contains some of the most extraordinary passages in the Torah. Moses asks God to “show me now Thy ways, that I may know Thee” (Exodus 33:13) and gets the comforting response, “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest.” But…
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Looking Back April 14, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD All Jewish immigrants in New York know there are circumstances that force those in transit to remain in custody on Ellis Island for certain periods of time. Sometimes it is because they are ill, other times it is due to the fact that they do not have enough money…
The Latest
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Miami Vice Versa
Saving South Beach By M. Barron Stofik University Press of Florida, 336 pages, $27.95. * * *| Miami’s South Beach neighborhood is an urban icon. Bringing new meaning to the term multicultural, South Beach is one of the only places in the United States where a twenty-something can have morning coffee with Grandma and her…
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A Crowd of Voices Covers a Folk Legend
In last year’s “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,” filmmaker Lian Lunson pays homage to the man often considered the Canadian equivalent of Bob Dylan by filming a succession of performers singing Cohen’s songs, in scenes that emphasize just how beautiful his songs are when sung by someone else. When Cohen sings his own works —…
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State of Emergency: The Demise of Secularism
The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously By Jacques Berlinerblau Cambridge University Press, 232 pages, $19.99. * * *| God, it turns out, is not dead, but secularism might be — unless it deigns to take another look at itself, at God and at God’s book, and seeks to study and know what…
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From the Stage To the Page
Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays Edited by Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnick Foreword by Theodore Bikel University of Texas Press, 587 pages, $24.95. * * *| Published plays — especially those in anthologies — tend to be dismissed by the casual browser as specialty items, of interest only to students of theater history or to actors…
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The Essential Louis Zukofsky
Selected Poems By Louis Zukofsky, edited by Charles Bernstein Library of America, 191 pages, $20. * * *| Louis Zukofsky, born into a pious, Yiddish-speaking household on New York City’s Lower East Side in 1904, seems to have jumped fully formed into American poetry. In 1928, when he was 24, his mentor and intellectual sparring…
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Looking Back April 7, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Three notorious clerks at New York City’s Grand Street Post Office have swindled thousands of Jews. The clerks, George Davidson, William Spencer and John Mahoney, were arrested last night after police were alerted to their scam — which may have been going on for years. They would take the…
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Allegra Goodman’s Science Fiction
Intuition By Allegra Goodman The Dial Press, 352 pages, $25. * * *| In her new novel, “Intuition,” Allegra Goodman invokes the world of medical research with the convincing detail of an insider and an outsider’s penetrating gaze. The book is a modern epic, a slimmed-down, suspenseful version of one of the 19th-century classics: a…
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A Road Trip Through the Mideast Conflict
When he’s at his best, Israeli auteur Amos Gitai captures the peculiar pain, and paradox, of individuals filled with national yearning. What a person needs from a country and what a country needs from a person should not on its face have reason to overlap, and Gitai is obsessed with why — and what happens…
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