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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The Sacred, Contained in the Profane
The first few frames of “Ushpizin,” the Israeli Academy Award-winning film released today in theaters nationwide, bear a peculiar marking you will not seen on any other film this year: In the top right-hand corner of the screen, three Hebrew letters gleam discreetly — bet, samech, dalet. The letters form an acronym for Aramaic words…
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The Animated Life of a Film Giant
Out of the Inkwell: Max Fleischer and The Animation Revolution By Richard Fleischer (foreword by Leonard Maltin) University Press of Kentucky, 232 pages, $27.50. * * *| In 1925, pioneering New York film animator Max Fleischer decided that what the world needed was a five-reel feature film that combined animation and live action, to explain…
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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….
The Latest
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Writing a Fugue of Mystics, Misery and Memoir
In “I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir” Rafi Zabor’s heady, 472-page memoir, he portrays his life as a series of unpredictable transformations. The first major life twist occurred in 1969, the summer of love, when Zabor was 23 and fresh from Brooklyn College. It was then that he left his parents’ home in Brooklyn, where he’d been…
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Strategies for Remaining True
Translators of ancient texts, including those who render the Hebrew Bible, not uncommonly confront passages and phrases that do not seem to make sense as transmitted or that, in alternate (and also ancient) wording, fit better into the immediate context. No matter what approach these translators take — from hyper-literal to periphrastic — they must…
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Excerpt: ‘The Alternate’
Each month, in coordination with “Novel Jews,” our reading series in New York, the Forward publishes an excerpt from the work of that month’s series guest or guests. In deference to Yom Kippur, the reading series will not be held in October, but we decided everyone could still meet on the page. Here we offer…
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Moses’ 120th Birthday
On his 120th birthday, Moses addresses the Israelite people encamped outside Jericho: I don’t walk as well as I used to, he tells them. (Elsewhere we learn that his powers are divinely undiminished, but we had better be willing to accept two truths for the price of one in life as well as in story.)…
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October 7, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD The city of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., has a growing Jewish community. It also has a strange problem: The trustees of Poughkeepsie’s synagogue were indicted for disturbing the peace. The reason? Apparently, the yearly sounding of the shofar was disturbing the synagogue’s Christian neighbors. Also included in the complaint was the…
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One Nation Under God?
As Senator Dianne Feinstein wrapped up her opening remarks during the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts, she offered an apparent plea for preserving a robust separation of church and state. “During the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and even today,” the California Democrat said, “millions of innocent people have…
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New Docudrama Emcees E=mc2
Arguably the greatest mind of the modern world, Albert Einstein famously would neglect to wear his coat in the dead of winter, absentmindedly misplace his keys and forget life’s little details, like where he lived. So perhaps it’s not shocking that when it came to proving correct his most famous equation, E=mc2, it took the…
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September 30, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Emmanuel Feigenbaum was already married to three women and was about to marry a fourth when the police intervened. Feigenbaum left his first wife, Yetta, and married Maria Kotter without divorcing Yetta, who had been searching for him. Yetta managed to find Kotter and while they were commiserating over…
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