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 Real Lives Behind the Superheroes
In the late 1930s, comic books presented a relatively small sideshow in the circus of pulp publishing. Then suddenly, in the fall and winter of 1938, following into early 1939, they became the main event. Within a year — by 1940 — 15 million comic books were being sold each month (and this in a…
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A Woman Who Looked Like Dietrich And Wrote Like Woolf
The much revered Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was born a Jew and buried a Jew, but in between, it seems, she struggled simply to be Clarice, with an accent on the usually silent final syllable, see. If anything, the gorgeous, exotic-looking Lispector wanted only to be seen as a native Brazilian, an identity that her…
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A Holocaust Memoir, Minus the Holocaust
Irving Howe wrote that after reading Italian writer Primo Levi, he wanted “to start having a conversation with him.” Bela Zsolt’s memoir of his time spent as a member of a Hungarian labor brigade in the Ukraine and later in the Nagyvarad Ghetto near the Romanian border during World War II gave me the same…
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Arabesques and E-Cantors In Prague, a Digital Re-envisioning of the Marseilles Bible
Around 1260, in the Spanish town of Toledo — then a prime seat of Jewish thought and art — an unknown scribe or possibly scribes gave life to a manuscript breathtaking in its rare beauty and hermetic symbolism, at once traditional and yet culturally reckless. Its pages — abundant in imagery while respecting the prohibitions…
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The Shadow of God
The details of the building of the tabernacle are relentlessly mundane, and we read them trusting that they might perhaps be of interest to a committee of architects, accountants and engineers whose arcana we have never studied and whose work is utterly mysterious to us. “And of the thousand seven hundred seventy and five shekels…
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Giving One’s Life
There’s a Hebrew term that looks like it’s going to be heard a lot in the coming months. It’s mesirut-nefesh, which means, literally, “giving one’s life,” and, in ordinary language, “devotion” or “giving one’s all.” But for the settlement movement that is now gearing up to fight this summer’s planned disengagement from Gaza, mesirut-nefesh has…
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Radio Days: A Life Heard
35 and up category Winner: Seymour Zimilover Age: 81 – In the days before television, radio was the major source of entertainment for most people. It was even more important than the movies in that going to the movies was a once or twice-a-week affair, but radio was a seven-day activity. Among the major stations…
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Trouble at Christmastime
15-18 category Winner: Mira Scarvalone Age: 15 I come from an interesting family. My father was raised a Christian and my mother, as an adult, converted to Judaism. I have only one Jewish grandparent. So technically, I am only a quarter Jewish. But I was never faced with the choice of being a Christian, or…
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The Winners; A ‘Naturalized’ New Yorker
10-14 category Winner: Mattie Kahn Age: 12 I am walking down the street when I see a woman reaching up to check that the scarf on her head is in place as she pushes her baby. In an instant I identify the head covering worn by some religious women upon their marriage. To those who…
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The Day After Yom Kippur
Just last week, we were reading about an outrageous sin, the fashioning of a golden calf by Aaron the Priest, Moses’ brother. He did this at the behest of the nervous Israelites, whose anxiety was pushed beyond their tolerance limit by Moses’ long stay on Mount Sinai. The story of that manic insistence upon a…
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March 4, 2005
100 YEARS AGO • Ten Jewish derelicts were hired to recite Psalms for a person who had died. The relatives of the deceased gave one of them, Aaron Kalish, a bit of cash for all of them. Kalish went out and bought some cake and a bottle of illegally distilled alcohol for the group. He…
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Culture My father was my hero and, when he was dying, I wrote this song for him