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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December 30, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Max Cohen, a 21-year-old resident of New York City’s Harlem area, was arrested on the charge of burglary. He stands accused of robbing more than 30 homes in a unique way: by posing as a window shade repairman. When Cohen appeared at the door of the Holland home, he…
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Iron-fisted in Politics, Velvet-gloved in Fiction
The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn-of-the-Century Odessa Vladimir Jabotinsky, translated from the Russian by Michael R. Katz Cornell University Press, 203 pages, $17.95. * * *| The tradition of the statesman-writer is one with a long history — particularly in Britain, where Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill (winner of the 1953 Nobel…
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Reading Kafka’s Love Letters as a Key to His Mind
Kafka: The Decisive Years By Reiner Stach, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Harcourt, 592 pages, $35. * * *| ‘I am nothing, absolutely nothing,” declared Franz Kafka, who longed to contract his life into a perfect sentence. Eighty-one years after his death, we’ve got plenty of nothing. Posthumous publication of thousands of pages…
The Latest
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When The Streets Were Paved With Tragedy
Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced Into Prostitution in the Americas By Isabel Vincent William Morrow, 288 pages, $25.95. * * *| Memory is a central concept in Judaism. When someone dies, we say that he or she lives on in how he or she is remembered by others. Countless…
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An Israeli Filmmaker Finds an Unlikely Muse
What do “Easy Rider,” Johnnie Walker, Walt Disney and the State of Israel have in common? Allow me to introduce Ami Ankilewitz. Born in Laredo, Texas, Ankilewitz was diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy as an infant, and his mother was told that he would not live past the age of 6. Now…
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Fortunately Unfortunately
Joseph dreams and interprets dreams that are understood to be communications from God. They foretell God’s intention and move God’s narrative forward. If we want to look for human motive, we had better do it in the form of suppositions: Was it innocence, was it a phenomenal lack of tact, or was it testosterone that…
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Ron Howard’s Moving Images
The celebrity-filled Museum of the Moving Image December 4 gala salute to actor-director-producer Ron Howard was akin to a photographer-frenzied Hollywood premiere. Herbert Schlosser, museum board of trustees chairman, and Rochelle Slovin, the institution’s director, welcomed the stellar crowd at The Waldorf-Astoria. A beaming attendee was Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, in whose Astoria bailiwick…
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December 23, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A benefit was held this week at the Casino Theater to raise funds for the Jews of Russia, who have been brutally attacked, robbed and murdered. Among the major talents who participated in the benefit: famed actress Sarah Bernhardt, who showed up late and refused to sit in her…
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Israel’s Walter Cronkite Finds Himself at a Crossroads
Chaim Yavin, rightly referred to as Israel’s Walter Cronkite, has an odd face for a news anchor. Though his presence has comforted millions, delivering the news nightly on Israel’s state-run channel — with an almost exaggeratedly perfect diction — since 1968, his features seem to betray a slight befuddlement, a tinge of obliviousness. It’s not…
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Holy Feast, Holy Fast
Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah By Joel Hecker Wayne State University Press, 296 pages, $44.95. * * *| Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture By Eliezer Diamond Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $49.95. * * *| To put it mildly, Jews have a complicated relationship…
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Yeah, but the Book Is Better
Whenever a film is adapted from a favorite novel, serious readers of fiction are prone to say, “Yeah, but the book is better.” True partisans of the written page are always in conflict with those who like their stories cinematically revealed, projected onto wide screens that illuminate the darkness and pierce the quiet with Dolby…
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