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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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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Strategic Difference
Halacha (Jewish law and practice) doesn’t ordinarily care about its own interpretations. So long as the Jew does what he or she is supposed to do, the system doesn’t care why he does it or how she understands what she does. For this reason, the great codes of Jewish law describe what is required of…
The Latest
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October 21, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A group of hooligans, the same group that attacked the Bund headquarters on Manhattan’s East Broadway on Yom Kippur, showed up again this week outside the organization’s offices. As the group of delinquents stood outside, banging on the windows and laughing loudly, one of the Bundists, Comrade Berger, went…
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Exploring Latin Music, In and Out of the Ivory Tower
Traditional Cuban popular music — the kind of stuff that was big in the 1940s and became big again in the late 1990s, thanks to the Buena Vista Social Club — is designed to get you out of your chair and onto the dance floor. And if you listen carefully, you’ll notice that much of…
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‘Silence, Exile and Cunning’
Party in the Blitz: The English Years By Elias Canetti Translated by Michael Hoffman Afterword by Jeremy Adler New Directions Publishing Corporation, 249 pages, $22.95. * * *| ‘I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can,” the character of…
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Romance for the AARP Set
If you can brave Harry Freund’s debut novel, you’re in for a thrill ride that only the raucousness of an aging Jewish social scene can provide. “Love With Noodles: An Amorous Widower’s Tale” (Carroll & Graf) is set on the Manhattan’s dangerous and rocky terrain known as the Jewish Upper East Side. Our navigator, Dan…
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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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The Plot Thickens, With Female Rabbis Stirring the Pot
The rabbi. In popular culture, he has been everywhere — on the page, of course, but also on the small and big screens. He has been a moral center, a family supporter, a shyster, a pontificator (naturally); he has been an ancillary character and a main one; he has been a villain and a hero….
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October 14, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Five teenage boys, Isadore Klinger, Harold Shredder, Joseph Steinberg, Solomon Cossack and Salvatore Masse — all residents of the same Chrystie Street block on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — were arrested on the charge of running a “school” for young thieves. They were caught on the corner of Essex…
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The Sacred, Contained in the Profane
The first few frames of “Ushpizin,” the Israeli Academy Award-winning film released today in theaters nationwide, bear a peculiar marking you will not seen on any other film this year: In the top right-hand corner of the screen, three Hebrew letters gleam discreetly — bet, samech, dalet. The letters form an acronym for Aramaic words…
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