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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A Literary Hot Spot Celebrates a Birthday
When journalist and short-story writer David Ehrlich told poet Yehuda Amichai about his plan to open a literary café in Jerusalem, Amichai was less than enthusiastic. “Your customers will spill coffee on the books,” he said. “And they won’t pay for the coffee — or the books.” Happily, Amichai’s fears proved unfounded. Not only did…
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Will the Left Finally Talk About What Matters?
For years I’ve tried to get my students to talk about “it.” “It” can be almost any controversial issue, but we never get there; my students, like most of my academic colleagues and New York City Upper West Side friends, and the American left in general, have long ago ceded actual moral judgments to others,…
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Listen to This Poet. Really, Listen.
‘I was dreaming you on TV/ between fiction and news,” Hugh Seidman, winner of the 2004 Green Rose Prize, writes in his romantically infused sixth collection of poems, “Somebody Stand Up and Sing.” After reading his poetry, you might find yourself dreaming Seidman. O Dream Dream Dream I fasted not nor atoned I made no…
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Translations And Transliterations
Each of the first three chapters of Leviticus, and therefore of this week’s portion, Va-Yikra, is taken up with a detailed description of a different offering or sacrifice. Although many modern readers of the Hebrew Bible devote little more than a glance to this material, it was obviously important to the ritual life, and therefore…
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March 18, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • One of the worst tragedies ever to strike Manhattan’s Lower East Side occurred yesterday at the corner of Allen and Delancey Streets. The heartbreaking wail of mothers looking for their children and of children searching for their parents mixed with tears, blood, fear and death as 20 bodies lay waiting to…
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March 11, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • To the esteemed editor of the Forward: Recently, I have been going to the Thalia Theater more than to the other Yiddish theaters, but last Sunday I witnessed a scene outside the theater that gave rise to bitter feelings. Next to the Thalia stood a few peddlers, young boys, selling candy…
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The Real Lives Behind the Superheroes
In the late 1930s, comic books presented a relatively small sideshow in the circus of pulp publishing. Then suddenly, in the fall and winter of 1938, following into early 1939, they became the main event. Within a year — by 1940 — 15 million comic books were being sold each month (and this in a…
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A Woman Who Looked Like Dietrich And Wrote Like Woolf
The much revered Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was born a Jew and buried a Jew, but in between, it seems, she struggled simply to be Clarice, with an accent on the usually silent final syllable, see. If anything, the gorgeous, exotic-looking Lispector wanted only to be seen as a native Brazilian, an identity that her…
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A Holocaust Memoir, Minus the Holocaust
Irving Howe wrote that after reading Italian writer Primo Levi, he wanted “to start having a conversation with him.” Bela Zsolt’s memoir of his time spent as a member of a Hungarian labor brigade in the Ukraine and later in the Nagyvarad Ghetto near the Romanian border during World War II gave me the same…
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Arabesques and E-Cantors In Prague, a Digital Re-envisioning of the Marseilles Bible
Around 1260, in the Spanish town of Toledo — then a prime seat of Jewish thought and art — an unknown scribe or possibly scribes gave life to a manuscript breathtaking in its rare beauty and hermetic symbolism, at once traditional and yet culturally reckless. Its pages — abundant in imagery while respecting the prohibitions…
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The Shadow of God
The details of the building of the tabernacle are relentlessly mundane, and we read them trusting that they might perhaps be of interest to a committee of architects, accountants and engineers whose arcana we have never studied and whose work is utterly mysterious to us. “And of the thousand seven hundred seventy and five shekels…
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