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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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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From ‘Wanderers’ by Richard Stern
Each month, in coordination with our reading series in New York, the Forward publishes an excerpt from the work of that month’s series guest or guests. This month, we will feature readings by Richard Stern and Daniel Stolar (for full details, please see sidebar), and the excerpt we have chosen to highlight is from “Wanderers,”…
The Latest
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Plant Names in Yiddish
‘Di geviksn-velt in yidish,” or, as it is titled in English, “Plant Names in Yiddish,” is a volume of botanical terminology, in part assembled and in part newly coined by Yiddish linguist and scholar Mordkhe Schaechter, that recently has been published by New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. It is both an impressive work…
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September 2, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A letter from Lublin, Poland, has arrived in the offices of the Forward, describing a horrific pogrom that occurred a few weeks ago on the night of Tisha B’av. As Jews sat on the floor of the synagogue reciting kinot (elegies) in memory of the destruction of the Temples…
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Gornick’s ‘Attachments,’ Still Fierce
This month, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will republish “Fierce Attachments.” Vivian Gornick’s 1987 memoir. Couldn’t I just say that you must read it? That I am here to insist this book become a banner in the wide world, as it is a banner already in my mind, one I march behind? Gornick’s memoir has that…
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A Little off the Top: The Controversy About Circumcision
Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision From Ancient Judea to Modern America By Leonard B. Glick Oxford University Press, 384 pages, $30. * * *| To put it mildly, circumcision is a delicate subject. It’s almost impossible to discuss the matter without cracking a joke, probably because the ritual makes at least 49% of the population…
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Individuality, Indelibly Expressed
The Tattoo Artist By Jill Ciment Pantheon Books, 224 pages, $23. * * *| The earliest recorded use of the word “tattoo” is found in descriptions of a Tahitian ritual, written by British explorer Captain James Cook during a 1769 voyage through the South Pacific. Imported into English vocabularies to describe the indelible body art…
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Who Is That Bearded Man?
Have Israelis forgotten Herzl? Has the man been eclipsed by his famous black beard? Become a kind of George Washington, known but not appreciated? Little more than a street name? Just a mysterious, scowling figure whose image, plastered to the side of a water tank, young sabras pass on their way to the beach at…
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Dating Tefillin
‘Behold,” this week’s portion, Re’eh, begins, “I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.…” Not “or” but “and,” and we, of course, get to choose. It is the doubleness of the portion that speaks to me, for most of what we read in Re’eh is an iteration of the laws of kashrut…
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A New Book Examines How Yiddish Became the Language of Aggravation
Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods By Michael Wex St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages, $24.95. * * *| If you asked me whether I enjoyed Michael Wex’s hilarious and learned book, “Born To Kvetch,” I would find myself in an impossible quandary. To admit the rare pleasure I derived…
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