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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Untranslatable Sentiments
Paul Celan: Selections Edited by Pierre Joris University of California Press, 230 pages, $17.95. * * *| It might seem ironic that the most important German poet of the second half of the 20th century was a Romanian Jew who lived most of his adult life in Paris. But it is not. Paul Celan, born…
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July 15, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Early in the morning, Morris Klein came into the Forward offices with his 8-year-old daughter. “Please, take my child,” he said. Klein, who arrived in New York recently from St. Louis, is a poor laborer whose wife died this past Passover, leaving him to care for their four children. The two…
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Fields, Green Again
Although for many years it has appeared that the work of Austrian-born filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) was destined to fall into oblivion — in one of the earliest accounts of his career, from the 1970s, film scholar John Belton pronounced Ulmer “a totally unknown or, at best, an obscure figure in film history” —…
The Latest
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A Famed Bronx Boy Looks Back
The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue: A Child of the Fifties Looks Back By Robert Klein Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, * * *| ‘I was raised on chicken soup,” comedian Robert Klein wails in one of his signature song parodies, “Middle-Class Educated Blues.” In his startlingly candid memoir, Klein reveals other, more carnal sources of nourishment…
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Klezmer via Kingston
The postcard-sized calendars strewn about the world music venue Satalla, on West 26th Street in New York City, proclaimed the band Klezska to be purveyors of “klezmer music,” which is a lot like calling turducken “stuffed turkey.” Neither description is entirely misleading. But like most labels, they hardly tell the whole story. Founded and led…
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An Unsung Master Offers Sorrow (and Yuks)
Almonds to Zhoof: Collected Stories By Richard Stern TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 611 pages, $29.95. By Peter Orner * * *| STERN: A new collection includes 49 short stories. In a review of Bernard Malamud’s stories, Richard Stern once called Malamud “the poet of the American depression.” Call Stern the bard of postwar American failure….
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Balaam’s Experience
This week’s portion, on the prophet Balaam and the king of Moab, Balak, is a sort of microcosm of the Torah in that it encapsulates so many of its greatest modes and themes. Balaam’s prophetic praise-poems, rising to the most sublime heights, assert the power of God’s blessing over His chosen people in the face…
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The Logic of Impurity
The ritual of the Red Heifer is one of the most mysterious rituals in the entire Torah. (I have no doubt that this first sentence has been written many times before, but the ritual is so mysterious — so contrary to “logic” — that it is virtually impossible to write about it without commenting on…
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July 8, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Last week, the Forward predicted that the besieged Russian battleship Potemkin would celebrate its own Fourth of July. This, in fact, happened. On July 4, the soldiers and officers of the Potemkin formed a mutiny and joined the ranks of the revolutionaries. Just as the American revolutionaries declared themselves free from…
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An Army of One Ponders His Hunt for Israeli Oil
Oil: Israel’s Covert Efforts To Secure Oil Supplies By Zvi Alexander Gefen Books, 296 pages, $19.95. * * *| For most of his life, Zvi Alexander, a man with the guts of a gambler, was engaged in that most characteristic of Israeli pursuits: creating facts on the ground. Except in his case, these facts were…
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Brave New World Music
Israeli musicians Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan want you to get up, walk over to your CD rack, pull out the world-music samplers — yes, that “Putumayo Presents: Music From the Chocolate Lands” — and pitch them into the trash. Don’t sit just yet. They have a replacement suggestion: Balkan Beat Box, their New York-based…
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