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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Annual Guide to Jewish Genetic Diseases
The Forward presents this section to provide information on some of the more serious Jewish genetic diseases. There are about 20 “Ashkenazic diseases,” not counting the higher rates of at least four cancer-related genes. The diseases are more prevalent in the Eastern European Jewish population because of centuries of endogamy — literally, “marrying within.” Familial…
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Israelis Champion American Stem-cell Legislation
Dr. Shulamit Levenberg pulls out a dish of human embryonic stem cells from an incubator and carefully places them under a microscope to see how they are beginning to take form as human tissue. Levenberg, a researcher at the Technion University in Haifa, is working on cutting-edge tissue engineering research with the help of human…
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The Man Behind a Legendary Effort
Opportunities That Pass: An Historical Miscellany By Cecil Roth, edited by Israel Finestein and Joseph F. Roth, foreword by Raphael Loewe Vallentine Mitchell, 256 pages, $28.95. * * *| Of all the scholarly efforts in Jewish studies, none may be more influential than the 16-volume “Encyclopedia Judaica.” Since its publication in Jerusalem, in 1972, it…
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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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