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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Successors to Jacob, Successors to Arafat
In this last portion in Genesis, the children of Israel are on the verge of becoming a people. The next portion opens the book of Exodus with Pharaoh afraid of the potential might of the people (Exodus 1:9) he calls “Ivrim,” and it is as a people that the Ivrim, the children of Israel, go…
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December 17, 2004
100 Years Ago • Ms. Ada Ginsberg came into the office of the Forward and announced that she would like to sell her five-week-old baby. Ms. Ginsberg informed us that since her husband disappeared three months ago, she has been living in Brooklyn with her uncle. Unfortunately, her uncle is in dire financial straits and…
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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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A New Beginning for an Old Master
The Autobiography of God By Julius Lester St. Martin’s Press, 256 pages, $23.95. ——— Julius Lester is the author of more than 30 books, a diverse collection of novels, essays and children’s fables published over a period of 30 years. Now 65 years old and recently retired from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Lester’s latest…
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Gazing at the Guggenheims
The Guggenheims: A Family History By Irwin Unger and Debi Unger HarperCollins, 530 pages, $29.95. —— By the start of World War I, the Guggenheims had become so prominent that even their pets’ deaths were considered newsworthy. Ninety years later, they are chiefly remembered in the names of foundations and museums. In a heavily detailed…
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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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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…
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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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