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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April 1, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Sixteen-year-old Jacob Goldstein was sent upstate to New York’s Elmira Reformatory after he was convicted of kiting checks. Goldstein, who worked as a bookkeeper for the Hacker Luncheon Company, was able to keep the swindle a secret and managed to pilfer more than $5,000 from company accounts. In his defense, he…
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A Young Novelist Takes On 9/11
One of the pleasures of reading “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” Jonathan Safran Foer’s absorbing new novel, is that the experience helped me understand why I was so incapable of enjoying Foer’s first book, the into-30-languages-translated, into-major-motion-picture-being-made “Everything Is Illuminated” — or why (to take the blame off myself) that last book, published in 2002,…
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Reclaiming ‘The Dybbuk’
In 1974 Jerome Robbins premiered an enigmatic choreographic work, “The Dybbuk,” for New York City Ballet. A collaboration with Leonard Bernstein, it was based loosely on the play of the same name by S. Ansky about spirit possession and exorcism. On April 5 at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Ballet will revive the…
The Latest
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Out of Africa: The Rescue of Ethiopian Jews
Operation Solomon: The Daring Rescue Of the Ethiopian Jews By Stephen Spector Oxford University Press, 320 pages, $28. ——- French Premier Georges Clemenceau once said, “War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.” Had he read Stephen Spector’s new book on Operation Solomon, he would not have hesitated to qualify the rescue…
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Blending Comedy and Homage
With his innate ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand, Mike Burstyn could be a star in any language. He could sing a song in Sanskrit and still bring people to tears. He could crack a joke in total gibberish and still nail the punch line. Fortunately for the Folksbiene Yiddish…
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The Sensual Embrace of Elinor Carucci’s Camera
Maybe you’ve already seen Elinor Carucci’s breasts, maybe not. They’re beautiful and have even appeared in The New York Times Magazine. Just don’t look for them in the award-winning photographer’s second monograph, “Diary of a Dancer” (Steidl, 2005). There, it’s her belly that’s bare. Carucci’s first collection, “Closer” (Chronicle Books, 2002), elicited critics’ praise for…
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Determining the Bird
This column, both when written by myself and by others, typically dwells on the larger issues inherent in the particular portion — for example, a theological point, an ethical or moral lesson, a social observation, whatever it may be. I depart from that norm this week with a look into the arcane world of biblical…
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From The Vélodrome of Winter
The winner of this year’s Koret Young Writer on Jewish Themes award is Tim Bradford, a doctoral candidate in English at Oklahoma State University. Bradford won for his proposal for a novella based on the history of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an enclosed stadium built in Paris in 1910, which is best-known for two things: track…
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From ‘The Washington Story’
Jill Wasserstrom, cub reporter for her high school newspaper, the Lane Leader, was a great believer in fate, so it was not surprising that she would read great meaning into the fact that, in November 1982, three historically significant incidents would occur within one 12-hour period. On Wednesday evening, she and Lane Leader editor Wes…
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From ‘Pupik: How My Grandmother Saved My Bellybutton’
We were back at the table. It was Yom Kippur and we were not fasting. I had unintentionally done my share for three weeks in the summer, watching 20 pounds fall away, unable to get anything in or keep anything down. And Grandma needed to eat. Her doctor had set weight gain as a priority…
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From ‘Love is Blond’
If Dolly notices my slightly shaking hand, she is good enough not to mention it. She is as confident as her characters, carrying us both above this atmosphere of uneasiness that I have generated by my being overawed. Pre-empting my questions, she begins to speak. She talks first of her father. “He was always larger…
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