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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Seeing Gray in a Black-and-white World Francine Prose Turns the Screws on the Self-righteous
A Changed Man By Francine Prose HarperCollins, 432 pages, $24.95. ——- You’d think that Francine Prose might be losing some steam. After more than a dozen novels and a handful of short fiction and nonfiction works, it would stand to reason that this National Book Award-nominated author might be a prime candidate for writerly malaise,…
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The Logic of Religious Images
Close to the end of this week’s portion is the injunction (Leviticus 26:1), “You shall not make idols for yourselves.” The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2004) annotates this by referring the reader back to an earlier verse (25:42) on the freeing of Hebrew slaves in the jubilee year, which is required because “they…
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A Critic Hears False Notes in Music History
One of the liveliest and most remarkable books about music was published this year. In “The Oxford History of Western Music,” iconoclastic University of California, Berkeley, professor Richard Taruskin offers a 4,000-page, six-volume survey of everything there is to know about Western classical music. For one person to encompass the vast range of subject matter…
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Bright Lights, Little Village: Jews in Small-town America
* * *| ‘A baker who can make kimmel bread and German rolls (bagels, too, I suppose) can do well in Kalamazoo,” a field agent for the Industrial Removal Office of the Baron de Hirsch Fund reported in 1907. A junk dealer in Ashland, Ky., he added three years later, would gladly replace the Negro…
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May 13, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Despite the fact that the Russian government is attempting to keep news of this event out of the papers, reports from the city of Zhitomir, about 85 miles from Kiev, indicate that a large-scale pogrom has been taking place over the last five days. Thus far, 16 Jews have been killed…
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A New Novel Tears Down a Sacred Shrine
One of the more surprising moments in recent music history comes midway through the celebrated 1998 indie rock album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” by the band Neutral Milk Hotel. Hiding in otherwise understated tune are some startling lyrics: I know they buried her body with others Her sister and mother and five hundred…
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A Theory of Everything
Franz Rosenzweig is one of the most mentioned and least read of the Jewish philosophers. Everyone with an interest in modern Jewish philosophy includes him in its highest circle, along with Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Emanuel Levinas and, if religious philosophers are included, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rav Kook and Joseph Soloveitchik. But while even laypeople…
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May 6, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • A scandal has broken out in a block of tenement houses right in the middle of the Jewish quarter on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Because the police have not yet been notified, names of suspects are not being reported. Apparently the superintendent of one of the tenement houses, a woman, has…
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Jerusalem’s Shrine for the Muses
The customary thing for men and institutions is to flame out into a full-blown midlife crisis at 40. But who likes customary? No one, apparently, at the Israel Museum, which is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary with a sumptuous and supremely self-possessed exhibit called Beauty and Sanctity. It is, in fact, an über-exhibit — nine…
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This Month at Novel Jews
Novel Jews is a downtown reading series that presents provocative and enlightening fiction and literary nonfiction by both today’s literary superstars and the emerging voices of tomorrow. It is co-sponsored by the Sol Goldman 14th Street Y, the JCC in Manhattan and the Forward. SHALOM AUSLANDER was raised as an Orthodox Jew in Spring Valley,…
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‘Prophet’s Dilemma’ From ‘Beware of God,’ by Shalom Auslander
NOVEL JEWS Each month, in coordination with our reading series in New York, the Forward publishes an excerpt from the work of that month’s series guest or guests. This month, we will feature readings by Shalom Auslander and Leelila Strogov (for full details, please see sidebar), and the excerpt we have chosen to highlight is…
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