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 Surprise Literary Sensation Sweeping France
This year’s French literary sensation is quite a surprise, not least because she is a long-forgotten Jewish writer who died in Auschwitz. Irène Némirovsky was born into a wealthy Ukrainian family in 1903 and grew up among Kiev, Saint Petersburg and Riviera palaces. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, her family joined the ranks of White Russian…
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The Anthem Question
It’s not every day that a Palestinian gets to be an Israeli national hero, but it happened last week to Abbas Suan, the soccer player who scored a last-minute goal that gave Israel’s national team a 1-1 tie against Ireland and kept it in the running as a contender for the 2006 World Cup Finals….
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Controlling The Uncontrollable
This week’s portion, Tazria, is primarily concerned with the priestly rituals for dealing with the outbreak of macabre changes in the skin and flesh. The commentary in “The Jewish Study Bible” (Oxford University Press, 2004 tells us that “Tzara’at, seen as a gradual erosion of the skin, was thought to culminate, unless the patient recovered,…
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April 1, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Sixteen-year-old Jacob Goldstein was sent upstate to New York’s Elmira Reformatory after he was convicted of kiting checks. Goldstein, who worked as a bookkeeper for the Hacker Luncheon Company, was able to keep the swindle a secret and managed to pilfer more than $5,000 from company accounts. In his defense, he…
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A Young Novelist Takes On 9/11
One of the pleasures of reading “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” Jonathan Safran Foer’s absorbing new novel, is that the experience helped me understand why I was so incapable of enjoying Foer’s first book, the into-30-languages-translated, into-major-motion-picture-being-made “Everything Is Illuminated” — or why (to take the blame off myself) that last book, published in 2002,…
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Reclaiming ‘The Dybbuk’
In 1974 Jerome Robbins premiered an enigmatic choreographic work, “The Dybbuk,” for New York City Ballet. A collaboration with Leonard Bernstein, it was based loosely on the play of the same name by S. Ansky about spirit possession and exorcism. On April 5 at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Ballet will revive the…
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Out of Africa: The Rescue of Ethiopian Jews
Operation Solomon: The Daring Rescue Of the Ethiopian Jews By Stephen Spector Oxford University Press, 320 pages, $28. ——- French Premier Georges Clemenceau once said, “War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.” Had he read Stephen Spector’s new book on Operation Solomon, he would not have hesitated to qualify the rescue…
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Blending Comedy and Homage
With his innate ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand, Mike Burstyn could be a star in any language. He could sing a song in Sanskrit and still bring people to tears. He could crack a joke in total gibberish and still nail the punch line. Fortunately for the Folksbiene Yiddish…
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The Sensual Embrace of Elinor Carucci’s Camera
Maybe you’ve already seen Elinor Carucci’s breasts, maybe not. They’re beautiful and have even appeared in The New York Times Magazine. Just don’t look for them in the award-winning photographer’s second monograph, “Diary of a Dancer” (Steidl, 2005). There, it’s her belly that’s bare. Carucci’s first collection, “Closer” (Chronicle Books, 2002), elicited critics’ praise for…
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Determining the Bird
This column, both when written by myself and by others, typically dwells on the larger issues inherent in the particular portion — for example, a theological point, an ethical or moral lesson, a social observation, whatever it may be. I depart from that norm this week with a look into the arcane world of biblical…
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From The Vélodrome of Winter
The winner of this year’s Koret Young Writer on Jewish Themes award is Tim Bradford, a doctoral candidate in English at Oklahoma State University. Bradford won for his proposal for a novella based on the history of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an enclosed stadium built in Paris in 1910, which is best-known for two things: track…
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