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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From a Popular Composer, More Than Meets the Ear
If you had to choose a single word to describe the contemporary Jewish music scene, “eclectic” would be a good one. The klezmer revival of the 1970s begat klezmer-jazz, which in turn begat klezmer-funk, klezmer-punk and scores of other klezmer-hyphenates, all of which now coexist happily with Sephardic pop, Mizrahic hip hop, and innumerable other…
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Fame’s Good Fortune
Recently I came across an article in a Hebrew newspaper that bore the caption “Children of Celebrities Are Fed Up With Strange Names Given Them by Their Parents.” The article began with the complaint of Peaches Honeyblossom Michelle Charlotte Angel Vanessa Geldof, the 16-year-old daughter of singer Bob Geldof, that she would have preferred something…
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February 17
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD New York City’s Grand Street Post office has been besieged by Jews asking about the money orders they’ve sent to their relatives in Russia who are currently suffering a wave of pogroms. Dozens of Jews came to the Forward’s offices this week complaining that the money they’ve sent to…
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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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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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