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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November 4, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD It seems that nothing happens in Russia without the spilling of Jewish blood. As the tsar tries to save his tyrannous dictatorship, heaps of Jewish dead lay at the roadsides, and rivers of Jewish blood flow in the streets of Odessa, Kherson and about 10 other towns. Drunken pogromists,…
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October 28, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Word has come from Russia that the tsar finally has conceded to the demands of the people and that a real constitution will be issued, ultimately freeing that country from dictatorial servitude. At last the Russian labor movement has succeeded in forcing the tsar to give up his power…
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Retracing a Living Legend’s First Steps
Philip Roth: Novels and Stories, 1959-1962 Library of America, 913 pages, $35. Philip Roth: Novels, 1967-1972 Library of America, 672 pages, $35. * * *| One interesting way to pass the time is to spend an hour rereading old reviews of Philip Roth’s books. You read them and quickly discover that for as long as…
The Latest
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Seeing Red
My China Eye: Memoirs of a Jew and a Journalist By Israel Epstein Long River Press, 360 pages, $24.95. * * *| When the Chinese Communist Revolution finally came to eat one of its most devoted and passionate children, Israel Epstein, on a spring night in Beijing in 1968, the transplanted Russian Jew and prolific…
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Anatomy of a Jewish Literary Prize
Nearly every year, on that day in April when the Koret Jewish Book Awards were to take place at the wood-paneled, hushed environs of New York’s Harvard Club, I’d awake and ask myself, testily, why I had insisted we return to that same stuffy midtown pile. The location was convenient for publishers, book editors and…
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Coming of Age, in Frames
The Quitter By Harvey Pekar Art by Dean Haspiel with Lee Loughridge Vertigo, unpaginated, $19.99. * * *| Anyone who has seen the 2003 award-winning film “American Splendor” or watched Harvey Pekar’s confrontations with David Letterman late at night back in the 1990s is almost certain to conflate or confuse the real-life Pekar with one…
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A View From the Stands
Judaism’s Encounter With American Sports Jeffrey S. Gurock Indiana University Press, 248 pages, $29.95. * * *| Many a sports-obsessed Jewish kid will remember a Saturday buried somewhere deep in the past spent flipping through a dusty volume of “Great Jews in Sports” or one of its equivalents, whistling every few pages and exclaiming, “Wow!…
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Abraham’s Gambit
Stalemate By Icchokas Meras Translated by Jonas Zdanys Other Press, 176 pages, $13.95. * * *| To stalemate a game of chess is no easy thing: One has to position the king in a square in which, although he is not in check, he can only move into check and no other piece can move,…
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Mourning with Freud
Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk By Matthew von Unwerth Riverhead, 256 pages, $23.95. * * *| ‘Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk” by Matthew von Unwerth is a meditation, a fugue — conceivably a psychoanalytic novella –– that has at its nexus…
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Airing the Family’s (Blood-stained) Laundry
Blood Relation By Eric Konigsberg HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25.95. * * *| As a teenager at a boarding school, journalist Eric Konigsberg came across a groundskeeper who once had worked the mob beat as a New York cop. The man asked Eric if he was related to infamous mob hitman Harold Konigsberg. Thanks to his…
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Fragments of a Lost Jewish World
Young Turk By Moris Farhi Arcade Publishing, 392 pages, $25. * * *| Toward the end of Moris Farhi’s elegiac, ambitious novel, a professor of literature who is the voice of Turkish conscience in the book tells a budding Turkish Jewish writer: “One thing, young Turk: Don’t lose the young Jew. Cherish everybody’s difference. If…
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