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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Whither Utopia?
Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought For an Anti-Utopian Age By Russell Jacoby Columbia University Press, 240 pages, $24.95. * * *| Utopianism has gotten a bad rap over the past 50 years. The desire to secure happiness through the basic transformation of social institutions has been blamed for most of the past century’s carnage, from Hitler’s…
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Looking Back September 16, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD “The problem is that the bride is too pretty,” begins an editorial describing the English-language American press’s complaints about Jewish immigrants. Although some of the papers take on an allegedly friendly tone toward the Jews, they complain about how they excel in many aspects of life, from business to…
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Illuminating the Big Screen
Okay, class, here’s a question: You’re watching a movie that stars Elijah Wood, and one of the characters in the film says to him, “The ring is not here because of us. We are here because of the ring.” What movie is it? If you answered “The Lord of the Rings,” two demerits; turns out…
The Latest
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What Melting Pot?
Name a Woody Allen movie that has a leading black actor in its cast. Now, mention a “Seinfeld” episode in which Elaine, Jerry, George and Kramer socialize in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with some Korean friends. How about a story with Cuban Americans, written by Isaac Bashevis Singer? Movies, television and literature…
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An Author’s Story, Fleshed Out in Flesh
My Body in Nine Parts By Raymond Federman Starcherone Books, 136 pages, $16. * * *| The marketing departments that run America’s publishing houses now dictate to most the definition of literature. Even in the Jewish community, one of the last remaining “focus groups” of avid readers, we have let significant writers slip through the…
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Imagining Life as A Black Woman –– In the Bible
In a recent meeting with the Forward at the Hotel Plaza Athenee on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side, French novelist Marek Halter sketched one stone tablet, then its twin. He fashioned an ark around them and announced, “The Ten Commandments came from Moses.” He paused, popped a wasabi pea in his mouth and set his…
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In Praise of Dissembling
Deuteronomy 22:1-3 contains the admirable commandment to return your neighbor’s lost property. At the end of 22:3 we have the following isolated clause, preceded by a colon in the King James and by a semicolon in the Jewish Publication Society 1917 translations: thou mayest not hide thyself Everett Fox concurs, offering, after a colon, “you…
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Wilder Times: A Life and Legacy
‘A brain full of razor blades and a heart full of chutzpah.” That’s how filmmaker Billy Wilder described “Whiplash Willie” Gingrich, the opportunistic lawyer in “The Fortune Cookie” (1966). But those same words could well be used to describe Wilder himself. Wilder, the great American filmmaker who died in 2002, is best remembered for the…
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September 9, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A group of Jews were shot in the middle of the main street in broad daylight in Kishinev, during the funeral of a Jewish woman who was murdered by hooligans. As the procession made its way to the cemetery, a group of local police began shooting at the mourners,…
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A Laureate and the King Who Shared His Love of Verse
Unlike recent series of brief books by famous authors about famous subjects — including Penguin Lives, Eminent Lives and American Presidents — the new Jewish Encounters series is not a collection of biographies alone. While many of the planned books are about people — Seth Lipsky will write about Abraham Cahan, Jonathan Wilson about Marc…
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Beyond Klezmer: Jewish Music Today
Nothing signals the arrival of a musical genre like the emergence of a festival circuit. Folk festivals proliferated in the 1950s, rock festivals sprang forth in the ’60s and world music festivals began cropping up in the ’80s. Since its revival in the early ’70s, Jewish music has acquired its own fair share of festivals…
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