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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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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Finding Comedy in the Conflict
When choreographer David Dorfman toured with his dance company, he often sought out local rabbis to ask, “Who are the chosen people?” After listening to a thoughtful response, Dorfman’s standard follow-up question was, “Does that mean everyone else is un-chosen?” An obsession with questioning belief systems — and a healthy sense of humor — has…
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A Look Back at a Different Book Burning
Exactly 60 years ago, a group of individuals assembled to burn the prayer book of a Jewish leader and to ostracize him from community life. This event occurred not in Europe but in Manhattan, and the book burners were not Nazis. They were Jews. On June 12, 1945, at New York City’s Hotel McAlpin, the…
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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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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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The Aphorism Master
Yes damns no. No postpones yes. Tragic facts don’t exist. The magic of fiction lies in deluding reason that it is fiction. All ways lead to the wayfarer. The long lineage of literature’s shortest form, the aphorism, extends from the mythical Hippocrates of Greek antiquity, through the Renaissance, Erasmus and Paracelsus, into the modern Europe…
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Art At the Venice Biennale, protests, self-mutilation and rage against Israel and Russia. Is anyone left to talk about the art?