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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Labor’s Loves Lost
Paul Buhle is a senior lecturer in history and American civilization at Brown University. A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists In New York By Tony Michels Harvard University Press, 352 pages, $27.95. * * *| The tale of Jewish socialists on Manhattan’s Lower East Side offers one of those urban legends, alive with so…
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The Moses Between Egypt and Mendelssohn
Maimonides Sherwin B. Nuland. Schocken, 256 pages, $19.95. * * *| Three Moseses have decisively shaped Jewish history. On one end is Moses the Egyptian, a lawgiver and political leader whose vision established the path for a monotheistic revolution, thus defining the spiritual boundaries of a people. On the opposite end is Moses Mendelssohn, whose…
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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…
The Latest
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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…
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Reviving Jewish Ethics
A Code of Jewish Ethics: Volume 1: You Shall Be Holy By Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Harmony/Bell Tower, 576 pages, $29.95. * * *| The seven deadly sins, codified most likely in the 13th century, have enjoyed sustained notoriety, both ecclesiastical and in the public imagination. What is most noteworthy about these “capital sins,” as they…
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Across the Boundaries of Language
Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature By Hana Wirth-Nesher Princeton University Press, 256 pages, $39.50. * * *| As we enter a world that will forever remain “multicultural,” the borders of our languages have become easier than ever to cross. Paradoxically, to understand all of what is said and what is written…
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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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