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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For This Mother and Daughter, The Family Business Is Culture
Blood might be thicker than water, as the adage goes, but paint is thicker than both. Immigrant artist Miriam Laufer, who died in 1980, was the mother of Manhattan Upper West Sider Susan Bee, and matriarch to one of the most experimental and intense artistic dynasties of Jewish New York. Besides the mother and daughter,…
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Suffering the Peculiar Fate of Being a Poet’s Poet
The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918-1975 Edited by Seamus Cooney David R. Godine, 400 pages. $21.95. * * *| Charles Reznikoff, who was born to Russian parents in Brooklyn in 1894 and lived the bulk of his life in Manhattan, suffered the peculiar fate of being a poet’s poet: He was well respected and little…
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Tracking Change, and the Lack of It, In New York’s Garment Industry
A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform In New York City’s Garment Industry Edited by Daniel Soyer Fordham University Press, 312 pages, $75. * * *| ‘What’s the difference between a Jewish clothing worker and a Jewish psychiatrist?” an old joke goes. Answer: “One generation.” Actually it was more like two or even…
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Ansky, Pushkin’s Nanny and the Revival Of Jewish Life in St. Petersburg
The roomful of stunning photographs currently on display in Russia at the European University at St. Petersburg is dedicated to the theme of “Jewish Children.” It is triply wondrous: first, on account of the European University itself, one of several funded by George Soros in the former Soviet empire; second, on account of the artistic…
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‘Priest Among Nations,’ Says Rabbi Among Priests
‘What do Jews think is the role of non-Jews in the world?” This is the question I was asked recently by a thoughtful priest, one of two-dozen Roman Catholic priests and nuns for whom I was teaching a survey course on rabbinic Judaism. I understood that the question was as much about Jews as about…
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The Lord and His Children
We must not speculate about the motivations of the ineffable God, but there are the times when He chooses to explain them Himself. Speaking in the ear of Moses, the Lord says that He hardened Egypt’s heart — to its natural degrees of hardness, we might well suppose — so that it required His spectacular…
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February 10, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD There are all sorts of new sports that one can find here in the New World. One of them, which seems to have been imported from France, is hot air balloon sailing. One of its main enthusiasts, a balloonist by the name of Levy, has sailed into New York…
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Munich Evokes the Past in Future Museum
Mention “Munich” today, and people automatically think of Steven Spielberg’s controversial Oscar-nominated film. But if the city currently evokes disturbing images of international terrorism, it will soon also remind people of the sordid history of National Socialism. Change is afoot in Munich. In the heart of the city, behind a cheap chain-link fence a stone’s…
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A Daughter’s-eye View of a Man Who Was a Hero to Many
My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud By Janna Malamud Smith Houghton Mifflin, 304 pages, $24. * * *| Perhaps it was silly of me to imagine a tame, tender, avuncular Bernard Malamud. But from the little I knew of his biography — and there is no biography of him, though an…
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Beating Swords Into Photographs
David Seymour’s photograph “Wedding in the Border Regions” (1952) has something of the prophet Micah in it. The picture doesn’t beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruninghooks, but it does sculpt a chupah of pitchforks and rifles. This move of combining the sacred and the profane captures a fundamental aesthetic of the Israeli settlers….
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Chapter and Verse: Two Poets Explore Religion
The Insatiable Psalm: Poems By Yermiyahu Ahron Taub Wind River Press, 144 pages, $14. * * *| Morning Prayer By Eve Grubin Sheep Meadow Press, 96 pages, $12.95 * * *| Yermiyahu Taub named his first book of poems “The Insatiable Psalm,” a striking title that foretells the wealth of fine phrases that fill his…
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