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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Plumbing Berlin for Yiddish Fiction
The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson By Dovid Bergelson, Translated by Joachim Neugroschel City Lights Publishers, 120 pages, $14.95. * * *| Berlin’s role as the capital of Nazi Germany has crowded out most other memories of the city’s 20th-century Jewish history. In the 1920s, though, the city was a place…
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Roman Holidays
One thing to know about Alain Elkann, the much-discussed French-Italian-Jewish author, journalist, and man of Roman society, is that a lot of the talk is talk about his face. Think of a youthful, smoldering Richard Gere, then think one better. It is a face impossible to ignore, and it is not the face he has…
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Two Albums Offer Gems of Gypsy Melodies
Before the advent of the European Union and its open borders, long before Germany had been invaded by the Turks and France by the North Africans, two groups vied for the distinction of being the most despised people in Europe: Gypsies and Jews. More often than not, the Gypsies — or Roma, as they prefer…
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The Son Also Rises
In the Perlman family, musical talent is a family affair. Most people are familiar with Itzhak Perlman, the internationally renowned violin virtuoso. But his wife, Toby, is also an accomplished violinist. The couple’s daughter Navah is a concert pianist who tours worldwide both with her trio and as a soloist, and daughter Ariella plays the…
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July 22, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A riot occurred at the opening ceremony for a new synagogue in St. Louis. After the doors of Hevrat Sfarad opened to let in those who had gathered for the ceremony, the new synagogue filled up quickly and hundreds of people who had been waiting were unable to get…
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Standing Again With Lilith; The Long and Winding Roads of Jewish Feminism
These days, everyone is post-something: postmodern, post-Zionist — and, in many quarters, post-feminist. Like other “revolutionary” ideologies, feminism has come to mean different — indeed, diametrically opposed — things to different people. To some, it is the simple belief that women should be treated as equal to men: for example, that they should not be…
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Untranslatable Sentiments
Paul Celan: Selections Edited by Pierre Joris University of California Press, 230 pages, $17.95. * * *| It might seem ironic that the most important German poet of the second half of the 20th century was a Romanian Jew who lived most of his adult life in Paris. But it is not. Paul Celan, born…
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July 15, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Early in the morning, Morris Klein came into the Forward offices with his 8-year-old daughter. “Please, take my child,” he said. Klein, who arrived in New York recently from St. Louis, is a poor laborer whose wife died this past Passover, leaving him to care for their four children. The two…
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Fields, Green Again
Although for many years it has appeared that the work of Austrian-born filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) was destined to fall into oblivion — in one of the earliest accounts of his career, from the 1970s, film scholar John Belton pronounced Ulmer “a totally unknown or, at best, an obscure figure in film history” —…
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A Famed Bronx Boy Looks Back
The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue: A Child of the Fifties Looks Back By Robert Klein Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, * * *| ‘I was raised on chicken soup,” comedian Robert Klein wails in one of his signature song parodies, “Middle-Class Educated Blues.” In his startlingly candid memoir, Klein reveals other, more carnal sources of nourishment…
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Klezmer via Kingston
The postcard-sized calendars strewn about the world music venue Satalla, on West 26th Street in New York City, proclaimed the band Klezska to be purveyors of “klezmer music,” which is a lot like calling turducken “stuffed turkey.” Neither description is entirely misleading. But like most labels, they hardly tell the whole story. Founded and led…
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