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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WASHINGTON
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been widely hailed as a critical and popular success, drawing rave reviews and attracting 21.6 million visitors since its opening in 1993. More important than any of the first-rate exhibitions, however, was the decision to make the museum a federal institution and build it on the National Mall…
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In Memoriam
Last month, Yad Vashem, widely viewed as the first and most recognizable Holocaust museum in the world, inaugurated a completely redesigned new building. The project seems to have been propelled, at least in part, by the proliferation of regional museums and curated spaces devoted to memorializing the Holocaust. In honor of Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust…
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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…
The Latest
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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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April 22, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • After following three thieves from a store on 14th Street, police uncovered the Allen Street headquarters of an organized shoplifting ring. Upon entering the two-floor dwelling, police arrested Isaac Abramovitch, Sofia Steinberg and Dora Glener, aka Rachel Friedman, and found thousands of dollars’ worth of stolen goods. Police also uncovered the…
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The Praying Atheist A Look at the Poetry of Karl Shapiro
This is the second in a series of three poetry reviews, published in celebration of National Poetry Month. By the late 1940s, Karl Shapiro had already cut an impressive figure in American poetry. He was only 32 when he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. The following year he became the Library of Congress’s consultant…
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A Brief History of an Enduring Forgery
‘Lies have short legs” is a proverb invoked by historian Richard Levy in discussing historical frauds and forgeries. Clearly, in the case of a slew of antisemitic libels — most infamously “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — such folk wisdom is just plain wrong. “Protocols” may well be the longest-legged lie of modern…
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A Late Pioneer Is Still Pushing Boundaries
What’s so comic, exactly, about comic books? As far back as the Golden Age, when the form flourished in the hands of mostly Jewish American young men, relatively few of the word-and-picture narratives to which we ascribe this label have been primarily concerned with humor. The dominant modes have been action, mystery, horror and romance….
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‘My Version of the Facts’ By Carla Pekelis (Northwestern University Press)
One in a series of occasional excepts from books that catch our eye. Carla Pekelis was born in Rome in 1907, into a comfortably assimilated large extended bourgeois family. At 24, she married Alexander Pekelis, a Jewish Russian émigré who would become a seminal figure in American and international civil rights law. A founding member…
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‘Chassidic’ Jazzman Strives for Authenticity
In music, as in any art, intention and biography can be tricky things. For example, should Richard Wagner’s antisemitism be considered when judging his work? Is it fair to take the composer’s controversial writings into account when evaluating his operas? And does the value of his art really depend on the kind of person he…
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Treif Wasn’t Always Non-kosher
Of all the words contributed by the Yiddish language to modern American English, “kosher” is one of the more common — and, as a term neither coarse nor derisive, an exception to a general rule. American dictionaries frequently also list its antonym, treif (spelled with or without the “i”), defining it as “not kosher and…
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