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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Imagining Life as A Black Woman –– In the Bible
In a recent meeting with the Forward at the Hotel Plaza Athenee on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side, French novelist Marek Halter sketched one stone tablet, then its twin. He fashioned an ark around them and announced, “The Ten Commandments came from Moses.” He paused, popped a wasabi pea in his mouth and set his…
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In Praise of Dissembling
Deuteronomy 22:1-3 contains the admirable commandment to return your neighbor’s lost property. At the end of 22:3 we have the following isolated clause, preceded by a colon in the King James and by a semicolon in the Jewish Publication Society 1917 translations: thou mayest not hide thyself Everett Fox concurs, offering, after a colon, “you…
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Wilder Times: A Life and Legacy
‘A brain full of razor blades and a heart full of chutzpah.” That’s how filmmaker Billy Wilder described “Whiplash Willie” Gingrich, the opportunistic lawyer in “The Fortune Cookie” (1966). But those same words could well be used to describe Wilder himself. Wilder, the great American filmmaker who died in 2002, is best remembered for the…
The Latest
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September 9, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A group of Jews were shot in the middle of the main street in broad daylight in Kishinev, during the funeral of a Jewish woman who was murdered by hooligans. As the procession made its way to the cemetery, a group of local police began shooting at the mourners,…
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A Laureate and the King Who Shared His Love of Verse
Unlike recent series of brief books by famous authors about famous subjects — including Penguin Lives, Eminent Lives and American Presidents — the new Jewish Encounters series is not a collection of biographies alone. While many of the planned books are about people — Seth Lipsky will write about Abraham Cahan, Jonathan Wilson about Marc…
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Beyond Klezmer: Jewish Music Today
Nothing signals the arrival of a musical genre like the emergence of a festival circuit. Folk festivals proliferated in the 1950s, rock festivals sprang forth in the ’60s and world music festivals began cropping up in the ’80s. Since its revival in the early ’70s, Jewish music has acquired its own fair share of festivals…
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From ‘Wanderers’ by Richard Stern
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 Richard Stern and Daniel Stolar (for full details, please see sidebar), and the excerpt we have chosen to highlight is from “Wanderers,”…
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Plant Names in Yiddish
‘Di geviksn-velt in yidish,” or, as it is titled in English, “Plant Names in Yiddish,” is a volume of botanical terminology, in part assembled and in part newly coined by Yiddish linguist and scholar Mordkhe Schaechter, that recently has been published by New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. It is both an impressive work…
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The Case of the Two Sleuths
A chalk outline on the ground. An older gentleman in the worn robes of a scholar paces off the distance from the chalk outline to the nearest city. He is joined by a fellow in a houndstooth coat and deerstalker cap, a calabash meerschaum clenched tightly in his teeth. Moshe: Three hundred forty-one, three hundred…
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This Month at Novel Jews
For decades, Richard Stern has been acclaimed as an American master of the short story. His awards include the Medal of Merit for the Novel, given by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Heartland Prize for 1995’s best work of nonfiction. Daniel Stolar finished two years at the Yale University…
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September 2, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A letter from Lublin, Poland, has arrived in the offices of the Forward, describing a horrific pogrom that occurred a few weeks ago on the night of Tisha B’av. As Jews sat on the floor of the synagogue reciting kinot (elegies) in memory of the destruction of the Temples…
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