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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From the Dawn of Printing Why Rare Hebrew Manuscripts Are Commanding Exorbitant Fees
Early in last month’s sale at Kestenbaum & Company, a New York auction house specializing in rare Hebrew books, when a single leaf of Rashi’s commentary on the Pentateuch came on the block, fevered bidding erupted. This first printed edition of the 11th-century French rabbi’s pre-eminent biblical commentary was produced in the small southern Italian…
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December 10, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • Currently there is a great deal of unemployment in general and in the Jewish trades specifically. As a result, masses of day workers assemble each morning in what is called the pig market, in Hester Street Park, and wait for foremen who need workers. Jewish workers have been shipped off to…
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What Is It About the Lower East Side?
Nothing has replaced it in our collective imagination. As a starting place, reference point and standard for community, the few square miles of New York City’s Lower East Side still loom with almost biblical significance over Jewish life on this continent. Even now, decades after the Jewish population of North America has moved beyond and…
The Latest
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Finding an Excuse To Celebrate Copland
No excuse is necessary to stage a concert of Aaron Copland’s works — over the last 60 years, his name has become synonymous with American classical music — but Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Kane Street Synagogue found one anyway. On November 14, it staged a tribute to the composer to coincide with the 91st anniversary of Copland’s…
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Berlin Bind: Between Neo-Nazis and Mendelssohn
Last month, one day after 1,000 skinheads marched here to celebrate the first-ever “National Nazi Day,” a different cast of Germans huddled into the country’s largest synagogue and listened raptly to cellist Steven Isserlis, whose performance opened the 18th Berlin Jewish Culture Festival. The events couldn’t have coincided more strangely, reflecting today’s wide split in…
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Bar Mitzvah-gate, Courtesy of Fox
In our post-“Nipplegate” era, censorship and television have become as inextricably linked as Laverne and Shirley. In recent weeks, fear of Federal Communications Commission fines led 65 ABC affiliates to nix an unedited version of “Saving Private Ryan,” while the bare backside of Nicolette Sheridan for a Monday Night Football spot was nearly enough to…
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Modern vs. Orthodox Off-Broadway
The new off-Broadway play “Modern Orthodox” begins familiarly enough, with an uncomfortable encounter. Two strangers awkwardly introduce themselves, sitting at a table in a restaurant in midtown New York. The two strangers are named Ben and Hershel; Ben is prepared to propose to his longtime girlfriend, Hannah, and Hershel is the jeweler whose engagement rings…
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At Syracuse University, Undulating Walls Commemorate Vanishing Barriers
In Syracuse, N.Y., artist Sol LeWitt has been building walls, while Nancy Cantor, the new chancellor of Syracuse University, has been breaking them down (figuratively speaking). Cantor, who was inaugurated last month as the 11th chancellor and president of the university, is the first woman and the first Jew to hold the position. Since her…
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Missing Rap Song Sparks Suspicious Musings
A fiery song by a popular rapper lashes out at “quasi-homosexuals” who run the hip-hop industry — drawing jeers from reviewers. The song also appears to take a shot at a prominent music executive, citing his Israeli background — and evoking for some the tensions that occasionally have surfaced over the prominence of Jewish executives…
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Don’t Mention His Weight Problem
Joseph’s interpretations of Pharaoh’s two dreams are, from an objective viewpoint, implausible. Both dreams are, in their essence, about fatness and thinness and eating. Applying Freudian principles of dream interpretation, we can assume that Pharaoh had been preoccupied, during the day leading up to the night of the dreams, though probably not fully consciously, with…
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Goodfellas and Great Gals Honor the Arts
“I’m a Forward fan,” Jay Golan, director of New York City’s Carnegie Hall, told me at the November 15 Arts & Business Council Awards Gala at Gotham Hall, where marble walls and domed ceilings offered ideal acoustics for violinist Sarah Chang’s impassioned rendition of Maurice Ravel’s “Tzigane.” Championing the partnership between business and the arts…
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