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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Generation Birthright Grows Up
The Task of This Translator By Todd Hasak-Lowy Harcourt, 272 pages, $13. * * *| Raymond and Hannah By Stephen Marche Harcourt, 216 pages, $14. * * *| Light Years By Tammar Stein Knopf, 272 pages, $15.95. * * *| There was a time when you hardly ever picked up an American novel or story…
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Fathers and Sons
From across the kitchen table, Bobby asks, “You want your firstborn son to die on a battlefield?” “Don’t be ridiculous.” Phil Gutman shakes his head. “We’re talking registration with the Selective Service, that’s all. You’re 18. It’s the law.” “I’ll be drafted to Iraq. We already did the Babylonian exile thing a long time ago,…
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June 3, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • A wild episode occurred this week in Max Solomon’s 19th Street skirt factory, located in New York City. The factory employs 400 workers. One of them, a presser, walked into the boss’s office to ask for his paycheck. When the boss said he didn’t have it, the presser demanded his pay….
The Latest
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The Man Behind The Equation
Albert Einstein looms over the 20th century. He was undoubtedly the greatest intellect of the past 100 years, a man whose very name is now synonymous with “genius.” His rise to fame began on June 30, 1905, when a German physics journal published a seemingly innocuous article titled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” —…
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May 27, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • With fists flailing, knife-and-ax-bearing mobs attacked the Jewish quarter in Warsaw this week. Now eight Jews are dead and more than 100 are wounded, some grievously. The unusual aspect of this pogrom was that it was entirely Jew-on-Jew action. As part of an effort to clean up the Jewish quarter, members…
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Brown Shirts and Dirndls A New Book Explores the History of Nazis and Fashion
Nazi Chic?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich By Irene Guenther Berg Publishers, 320 pages, $28.95. * * *| Was there an aspect of culture in which the Nazis did not take a fanatical interest? From numerous books and articles and films on the subject, we have become familiar with images of Nazis storming museums…
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A Literary Easterner With a Hollywood Muse
The Golden West: Hollywood Stories By Daniel Fuchs David R. Godine/Black Sparrow Books, 272 pages, $24.95. * * *| In his introduction to “The Golden West,” a new collection of Daniel Fuchs’s writings about California, John Updike places Fuchs in the company of similarly gifted fiction writers who did lucrative stints as screenwriters in Hollywood….
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Before Fusion: A CD Plumbs Statman’s Archives
Andy Statman is a practicing Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn and a top-notch clarinetist who has spent the past three decades playing klezmer — not, as some have, for irony or wedding gigs or nostalgia, but rather to explore highly personal paths of connection with the music’s spiritual roots. A new CD, “Avodas Halevi: Archival Recordings…
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The God In the Translation
The sadness of reading Torah without benefit of Hebrew has small compensations: I’m forced to look for — to participate in — the struggle of translators wrestling every last meaning from the original in order not to miss the god in the detail. The first half of the first sentence of this week’s portion offers…
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May 20, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Two Jewish youths, 18-year-old Max Dender and 20-year-old Harry Levi, were arrested for consorting with streetwalkers on Manhattan’s Bowery. After the police appeared and arrested the two streetwalkers, Dender and Levi took off running. The two young men ran to a house on 9th Street and began shouting, “Goldberg! Goldberg!” A…
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‘Tzir Kissufim* — Route of Longing’
Translated from the Hebrew by Toby Klein Greenwald A felled tree. Nothing more Will be as it will be And the ax that has shattered and will bow Beneath it, His voice is heard From one end of the world To the other. The waysides are shorn and haunted now To intensify security If the…
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