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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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!…
The Latest
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October 21, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A group of hooligans, the same group that attacked the Bund headquarters on Manhattan’s East Broadway on Yom Kippur, showed up again this week outside the organization’s offices. As the group of delinquents stood outside, banging on the windows and laughing loudly, one of the Bundists, Comrade Berger, went…
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Exploring Latin Music, In and Out of the Ivory Tower
Traditional Cuban popular music — the kind of stuff that was big in the 1940s and became big again in the late 1990s, thanks to the Buena Vista Social Club — is designed to get you out of your chair and onto the dance floor. And if you listen carefully, you’ll notice that much of…
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‘Silence, Exile and Cunning’
Party in the Blitz: The English Years By Elias Canetti Translated by Michael Hoffman Afterword by Jeremy Adler New Directions Publishing Corporation, 249 pages, $22.95. * * *| ‘I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can,” the character of…
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Romance for the AARP Set
If you can brave Harry Freund’s debut novel, you’re in for a thrill ride that only the raucousness of an aging Jewish social scene can provide. “Love With Noodles: An Amorous Widower’s Tale” (Carroll & Graf) is set on the Manhattan’s dangerous and rocky terrain known as the Jewish Upper East Side. Our navigator, Dan…
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Jacob van Ruisdael Is Not Jewish
‘Sir, I think you are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp in trying to find a firm connection,” Seymour Slive told me over the phone from his Maine summer home. At 85, Slive is Gleason professor of fine arts emeritus at Harvard University, former director of the Harvard Art Museums, and the Ruisdael scholar — with a collection…
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The Plot Thickens, With Female Rabbis Stirring the Pot
The rabbi. In popular culture, he has been everywhere — on the page, of course, but also on the small and big screens. He has been a moral center, a family supporter, a shyster, a pontificator (naturally); he has been an ancillary character and a main one; he has been a villain and a hero….
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Strategic Difference
Halacha (Jewish law and practice) doesn’t ordinarily care about its own interpretations. So long as the Jew does what he or she is supposed to do, the system doesn’t care why he does it or how she understands what she does. For this reason, the great codes of Jewish law describe what is required of…
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In a Corner of Austria, A Curator Plays With a Taboo
The far-western Austrian market town of Hohenems (population 14,000) is a good place to take in a chamber orchestra during one of many regional summer music festivals or to learn about water-driven mill technology, once a mainstay of the town’s economy. Less predictably, it’s also the location of one of Europe’s most innovative Jewish museums….
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