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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The Chosen People
Give Igal Hecht credit for trying. Making a movie about theology is tricky enough; making one about a fringe theology requires a miracle. In his ambitious but frustrating documentary, the Canadian filmmaker has taken on that perpetual urban curiosity, Jews for Jesus. By the choice of subject, one expects a flurry of proselytizing and street-side…
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Love Iranian-American Style
In “Love Iranian-American Style,” director Tanaz Eshaghian tackles the subject of marriage in the Persian-American community, where she interrogates, challenges and otherwise needles her relatives over their views on coupling. The Eshaghians fled the ayatollah’s brutal regime after the 1979 revolution, but the totalitarians they left behind need not worry; Eshaghian’s questioning might be considered…
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Best Sister
The charms of Ira Wohl’s family documentary, “Best Sister,” sneak up on you in the manner of a good deli sandwich, which may sound weird but for the fact that the film devotes key scenes to the pursuit of fine cured meats and other (deceptively important) banalities. The film is the final in a trilogy…
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Pork and Milk
Breaks from tradition also weigh on the mind of Valérie Mréjen, director of the pleasingly low-key French documentary “Pork and Milk.” Through a series of interviews, Mréjen throws a light on a number of young Israeli men who also happen to be have left the fold of ultra-Orthodoxy: a chef, a cantor with the radical…
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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…
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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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