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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Wedding the Personal and Political
Politics so comprehensively saturates Israeli life that even the most apolitical Israeli film ends up invoking it, if only by assiduous omission. In “The Syrian Bride,” opening November 16 in New York, Israeli director Eran Riklis not only acknowledges the elephant in the room but also gives it central billing. Ironically, he ends up with…
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Exploring What Binds –– and Divides –– Jews and Christians
Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History By David Klinghoffer Doubleday, 256 pages, $24.95 — The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament’s Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book By Julie Galambush HarperSanFrancisco, 352 pages, $24.95. — In the past few years, there has been a growing interest in the New Testament…
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The Roman Era, Revised
In many Jewish imaginations, the Roman period — from the conquest of Judea in 64 BCE to roughly the sixth century C.E. — is remembered as a time of tragedy and catastrophe. The early years of the Common Era witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple and the devastation of the Jewish populace in Israel…
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My Tower of Babel
I spent every holiday — American, Jewish and otherwise — with my mother’s Cuban family. At Rosh Hashanah and Passover we crammed into my Aunt Rachel’s five-room flat, which was decorated with ashtrays from various restaurants and hotels to which she had never been. Seated at the holiday table we were in a collapsed Tower…
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November 4, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD It seems that nothing happens in Russia without the spilling of Jewish blood. As the tsar tries to save his tyrannous dictatorship, heaps of Jewish dead lay at the roadsides, and rivers of Jewish blood flow in the streets of Odessa, Kherson and about 10 other towns. Drunken pogromists,…
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Ladino: Alive in Song, If Not Speech
For centuries after their expulsion in 1492, Sephardic Jews kept their new homes sounding like medieval Spain. In places as disparate as Amsterdam, Turkey and Greece, the Sephardim continued to live and pray in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language, up until the 20th century. Today there are not many opportunities to hear the language spoken, but…
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Food Fight
The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate Edited by Ruth Fredman Cernea University of Chicago Press, 184 pages, $18 — As if we didn’t have enough on our plates, here’s something new to argue about. Not that Jews don’t have a fine history of conflict: Hillel vs. Shammai, Bundists vs. Zionists, Labor vs. Likud. But now, to have…
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October 28, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Word has come from Russia that the tsar finally has conceded to the demands of the people and that a real constitution will be issued, ultimately freeing that country from dictatorial servitude. At last the Russian labor movement has succeeded in forcing the tsar to give up his power…
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Retracing a Living Legend’s First Steps
Philip Roth: Novels and Stories, 1959-1962 Library of America, 913 pages, $35. Philip Roth: Novels, 1967-1972 Library of America, 672 pages, $35. * * *| One interesting way to pass the time is to spend an hour rereading old reviews of Philip Roth’s books. You read them and quickly discover that for as long as…
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Seeing Red
My China Eye: Memoirs of a Jew and a Journalist By Israel Epstein Long River Press, 360 pages, $24.95. * * *| When the Chinese Communist Revolution finally came to eat one of its most devoted and passionate children, Israel Epstein, on a spring night in Beijing in 1968, the transplanted Russian Jew and prolific…
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Anatomy of a Jewish Literary Prize
Nearly every year, on that day in April when the Koret Jewish Book Awards were to take place at the wood-paneled, hushed environs of New York’s Harvard Club, I’d awake and ask myself, testily, why I had insisted we return to that same stuffy midtown pile. The location was convenient for publishers, book editors and…
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