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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Anatomy of a Jewish Literary Prize
Nearly every year, on that day in April when the Koret Jewish Book Awards were to take place at the wood-paneled, hushed environs of New York’s Harvard Club, I’d awake and ask myself, testily, why I had insisted we return to that same stuffy midtown pile. The location was convenient for publishers, book editors and…
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Coming of Age, in Frames
The Quitter By Harvey Pekar Art by Dean Haspiel with Lee Loughridge Vertigo, unpaginated, $19.99. * * *| Anyone who has seen the 2003 award-winning film “American Splendor” or watched Harvey Pekar’s confrontations with David Letterman late at night back in the 1990s is almost certain to conflate or confuse the real-life Pekar with one…
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A View From the Stands
Judaism’s Encounter With American Sports Jeffrey S. Gurock Indiana University Press, 248 pages, $29.95. * * *| Many a sports-obsessed Jewish kid will remember a Saturday buried somewhere deep in the past spent flipping through a dusty volume of “Great Jews in Sports” or one of its equivalents, whistling every few pages and exclaiming, “Wow!…
The Latest
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Abraham’s Gambit
Stalemate By Icchokas Meras Translated by Jonas Zdanys Other Press, 176 pages, $13.95. * * *| To stalemate a game of chess is no easy thing: One has to position the king in a square in which, although he is not in check, he can only move into check and no other piece can move,…
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Mourning with Freud
Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk By Matthew von Unwerth Riverhead, 256 pages, $23.95. * * *| ‘Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk” by Matthew von Unwerth is a meditation, a fugue — conceivably a psychoanalytic novella –– that has at its nexus…
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Airing the Family’s (Blood-stained) Laundry
Blood Relation By Eric Konigsberg HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25.95. * * *| As a teenager at a boarding school, journalist Eric Konigsberg came across a groundskeeper who once had worked the mob beat as a New York cop. The man asked Eric if he was related to infamous mob hitman Harold Konigsberg. Thanks to his…
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Fragments of a Lost Jewish World
Young Turk By Moris Farhi Arcade Publishing, 392 pages, $25. * * *| Toward the end of Moris Farhi’s elegiac, ambitious novel, a professor of literature who is the voice of Turkish conscience in the book tells a budding Turkish Jewish writer: “One thing, young Turk: Don’t lose the young Jew. Cherish everybody’s difference. If…
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A Family Snapshot, in Black and White
Off-White: A Memoir By Laurie Gunst Soho Press, 288 pages, $25. * * *| Rhoda Cobin Lloyd died in October 1986. Her funeral was a small, open-casket affair that ended with a eulogy by Laurie Gunst, Southern Jew and historian. The eulogy was short: All Gunst could say was that Lloyd’s parents, Sam and Julie,…
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FLASH FRAMES
Vladimir Jabotinsky may be best known as the father of Revisionist Zionism and as the author of the essay “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs,” but he also was a novelist who is known for his Zionist re-fashioning of the biblical hero Samson. Written in Russian, “The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in…
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The First Family
After the Parent gave birth to them, He settled down contentedly to watch their innocent gambols in the Garden. He’d warned His young Adam and Eve against the usual hazards of childhood, like running out into the street, avoiding snakes, not touching dangerous objects, and in their trance of innocence they’d nodded agreement to the…
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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…
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