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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Avant-garde Painter Constructs Bridges Across the Diaspora
For his 1966 painting “Kibbutz Composition,” artist José Gurvich crowded the canvas with layers of muted colors and boldly outlined images. At first, the kinetic composition tells of the artist’s zeal for kibbutz life. Look at it a little longer, and the story expands beyond the kibbutz; it moves into Latin America, where Gurvich’s hand…
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To Move or Not To Move: A Monumental Decision
Aliya: Three Generations Of American-Jewish Immigration To Israel By Liel Leibovitz St. Martin’s Press, 288 pages, $24.95. * * *| The past four centuries of American history are dominated by one overriding trend: immigration. People from every continent have, for very diverse reasons, moved in large numbers to a self-proclaimed “New World.” Although some immigrants…
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The Persistence of Memory
The Last Jew By Yoram Kaniuk, translated by Barbara Harshav Grove Press, 544 pages, $26. * * *| To name a thing is to give it life. And to write is to name. As Adam, the first man, is referred to in Latin as prothoplastus, cognate to our protoplasm, tradition might call the last man…
The Latest
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‘Memoirs of a Muse’
Novel Jews is a critically acclaimed downtown reading series that presents provocative and enlightening new fiction and literary nonfiction by today’s literary superstars and by the emerging voices of tomorrow. The event is co-sponsored by the 14th Street Y and the Forward. This month, we present Lara Vapnyar and Ilana Stanger-Ross. Lara Vapnyar emigrated from…
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Looking Back January 27, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Famed pianist Arthur Rubenstein, who recently arrived in New York from Russia, no longer can be considered a greenhorn. While he was standing backstage, about half an hour before a concert at the Casino Theatre, a young choir singer who was under the impression that Rubenstein did not speak…
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A Beatnik Finds Treasure In His Grandfather’s Beats
A Manhattan record label and a Minnesota distributor/publisher of spoken word audio, including books and radio programs, are among the companies that have expressed interest in a rare collection of Jewish liturgical recordings made in the 1950s, much to the relief of Lionel Ziprin, who has been trying to get the recordings out in the…
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Aleppo on Ocean Parkway
From Baghdad to Brooklyn: Growing Up In a Jewish-Arabic Family in Midcentury America By Jack Marshall Coffee House Press, 256 pages, $16. * * *| To have an identity strung together with hyphens is to live in several worlds at once. “From Baghdad to Brooklyn,” Jack Marshall’s beautifully crafted memoir, evokes an entire galaxy. Author…
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Elegy for a Fighter
Barney Ross By Douglas Century Nextbook (Schocken), 205 pages, $19.95. * * *| If attitudes toward Jewish boxers do not offer an all-encompassing symbol of continuing change in the social and cultural tastes of American Jewry, they probably come close. One of the many revealing anecdotes in this marvelously insightful study of the immigrant generation’s…
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The Battle Over ‘Judea and Samaria’
One would expect someone as pro-Israel as The New York Times’ William Safire to know better. In his January 16 On Language column, he wrote: “In wartime, words are weapons; we have seen how Israelis and Palestinians are highly sensitive to connotations in their conflict. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon preferred to refer to land in…
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A Little Too Intimate
The Book of Trouble: A Romance By Ann Marlowe Harcourt, 288 pages, $23. * * *| As Ann Marlowe painfully illustrates in “The Book of Trouble: A Romance,” finding intimacy is not as easy as finding one’s way into someone’s pants. Just as intellectual repartee does not necessarily make for an exciting sex life, a…
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The Unity of Opposites
Learning From the Tanya: Volume Two in the Definitive Commentary On the Moral and Mystical Teachings Of a Classic Work of Kabbalah By Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Jossey-Bass, 384 pages, $24.95. * * *| We Jews: Why Are We and What Should We Do? By Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Jossey-Bass, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Why…
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