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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‘Silence, Exile and Cunning’
Party in the Blitz: The English Years By Elias Canetti Translated by Michael Hoffman Afterword by Jeremy Adler New Directions Publishing Corporation, 249 pages, $22.95. * * *| ‘I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can,” the character of…
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Romance for the AARP Set
If you can brave Harry Freund’s debut novel, you’re in for a thrill ride that only the raucousness of an aging Jewish social scene can provide. “Love With Noodles: An Amorous Widower’s Tale” (Carroll & Graf) is set on the Manhattan’s dangerous and rocky terrain known as the Jewish Upper East Side. Our navigator, Dan…
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Jacob van Ruisdael Is Not Jewish
‘Sir, I think you are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp in trying to find a firm connection,” Seymour Slive told me over the phone from his Maine summer home. At 85, Slive is Gleason professor of fine arts emeritus at Harvard University, former director of the Harvard Art Museums, and the Ruisdael scholar — with a collection…
The Latest
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The Plot Thickens, With Female Rabbis Stirring the Pot
The rabbi. In popular culture, he has been everywhere — on the page, of course, but also on the small and big screens. He has been a moral center, a family supporter, a shyster, a pontificator (naturally); he has been an ancillary character and a main one; he has been a villain and a hero….
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Strategic Difference
Halacha (Jewish law and practice) doesn’t ordinarily care about its own interpretations. So long as the Jew does what he or she is supposed to do, the system doesn’t care why he does it or how she understands what she does. For this reason, the great codes of Jewish law describe what is required of…
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October 14, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Five teenage boys, Isadore Klinger, Harold Shredder, Joseph Steinberg, Solomon Cossack and Salvatore Masse — all residents of the same Chrystie Street block on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — were arrested on the charge of running a “school” for young thieves. They were caught on the corner of Essex…
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The Sacred, Contained in the Profane
The first few frames of “Ushpizin,” the Israeli Academy Award-winning film released today in theaters nationwide, bear a peculiar marking you will not seen on any other film this year: In the top right-hand corner of the screen, three Hebrew letters gleam discreetly — bet, samech, dalet. The letters form an acronym for Aramaic words…
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The Animated Life of a Film Giant
Out of the Inkwell: Max Fleischer and The Animation Revolution By Richard Fleischer (foreword by Leonard Maltin) University Press of Kentucky, 232 pages, $27.50. * * *| In 1925, pioneering New York film animator Max Fleischer decided that what the world needed was a five-reel feature film that combined animation and live action, to explain…
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In a Corner of Austria, A Curator Plays With a Taboo
The far-western Austrian market town of Hohenems (population 14,000) is a good place to take in a chamber orchestra during one of many regional summer music festivals or to learn about water-driven mill technology, once a mainstay of the town’s economy. Less predictably, it’s also the location of one of Europe’s most innovative Jewish museums….
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Writing a Fugue of Mystics, Misery and Memoir
In “I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir” Rafi Zabor’s heady, 472-page memoir, he portrays his life as a series of unpredictable transformations. The first major life twist occurred in 1969, the summer of love, when Zabor was 23 and fresh from Brooklyn College. It was then that he left his parents’ home in Brooklyn, where he’d been…
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Strategies for Remaining True
Translators of ancient texts, including those who render the Hebrew Bible, not uncommonly confront passages and phrases that do not seem to make sense as transmitted or that, in alternate (and also ancient) wording, fit better into the immediate context. No matter what approach these translators take — from hyper-literal to periphrastic — they must…
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