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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Neta Gain; A Choreographer Returns for Her Encore
Choreographer Neta Pulver- macher has aptly named her new season, which runs from May 11 to May 22 in New York at The Flea Theater, “NETRO: A Neta Dance Company Retrospective.” “I graduated from The Juilliard School in 1985 and started working right away. This season is a milestone — 20 years,” she noted in…
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Doomed Love and Melancholy
Publishers are notoriously reluctant to take on story collections, perhaps in part because unlike novels, a story collection has to justify its own existence. It isn’t enough for a story collection to be well written, poignant and intelligent. Why, readers ask themselves, have these eight to 12 stories been juxtaposed between the same covers? In…
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The Imagination’s Many Rooms
Jay Neugeboren’s “News From the New American Diaspora and Other Tales of Exile” is not only a cause for celebration in its own right but also an occasion to look back at Neugeboren’s long — and varied — career at the writing desk. Neugeboren’s short stories have been much honored, appearing in some 50 anthologies…
The Latest
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The Boy Who Started a War
On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jewish man living in Paris illegally, walked into the German embassy and shot Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat. The assassination triggered Kristallnacht, the organized Nazi pogrom against the Jewish community inside the boundaries of the Third Reich, and was the symbolic beginning of the Holocaust. Many…
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Neighbor, Fellow or Friend?
One of the best-known verses in the Bible occurs in this week’s Torah reading of Kedoshim. It is also one of the most controversial. The verse in question is Leviticus 19:18, the Hebrew of which contains the phrase “Ve-ahavta le-re’akha kamokha.” The King James Version of the Bible translates this as, “Thou shalt love thy…
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Remembrance Day
Marla sits alone in the sanctuary, her long face dimly illuminated by electric candles set about the room. She has arrived early for the Holocaust Remembrance Day service so as to contemplate private memories of the lost. Not that Marla can remember any specific person slain in the Holocaust, so long before her time, nor…
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May 6, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • A scandal has broken out in a block of tenement houses right in the middle of the Jewish quarter on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Because the police have not yet been notified, names of suspects are not being reported. Apparently the superintendent of one of the tenement houses, a woman, has…
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Jerusalem’s Shrine for the Muses
The customary thing for men and institutions is to flame out into a full-blown midlife crisis at 40. But who likes customary? No one, apparently, at the Israel Museum, which is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary with a sumptuous and supremely self-possessed exhibit called Beauty and Sanctity. It is, in fact, an über-exhibit — nine…
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This Month at Novel Jews
Novel Jews is a downtown reading series that presents provocative and enlightening fiction and literary nonfiction by both today’s literary superstars and the emerging voices of tomorrow. It is co-sponsored by the Sol Goldman 14th Street Y, the JCC in Manhattan and the Forward. SHALOM AUSLANDER was raised as an Orthodox Jew in Spring Valley,…
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April 29, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Because of the current state of unrest throughout Russia, Jews fear that signs are ripening for a wave of pogroms to take place, coinciding with the celebration of Orthodox Easter. Making matters worse, a Christian cleric in Zhitomir has been openly agitating among his Orthodox congregants for an attack on the…
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The Recklessly Relevant Poet
Unlike many poets in her generation, Muriel Rukeyser was always adamantly, sometimes even recklessly, relevant. Born into a well-to-do Jewish family on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 1913, she was both a firmly committed leftist and a bohemian. She drew on the sometimes-conflicting energies of Popular-Front activism and poetic experimentalism, which animated her work from…
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