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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NOVEL JEWS
“Novel Jews” is a downtown reading series in New York that presents provocative and enlightening fiction and literary nonfiction by both today’s literary superstars and the emerging voices of tomorrow. The reading is co-sponsored by The Sol Goldman 14th Street Y, the JCC in Manhattan and the Forward. WHEN: Wednesday, November 10, 7 p.m. –…
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Spiritual Hunger Artists
Joy Comes in the Morning By Jonathan Rosen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages, $25. —— Jonathan Rosen came to wide public attention, first as the editor (for some 10 years) of this newspaper’s highly regarded Arts & Letters section, and then as the author of “Eve’s Apple” (Random House Inc., l997), an impressive debut…
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Bridging a Rift Between Israelis and Americans
Outside a velvet rope on a recent fall evening last month, three dark-haired men tossed their cigarettes, passed a security check and queued up to pay a cover charge. They were chatting in Hebrew about a hot new software program as they entered the club, where a celebrity D.J. dubbed “Van Jee” was spinning tunes…
The Latest
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A Dutch Author Relishes the Spectacle
Story of My Baldness By Marek van der Jagt Other Press, 264 pages, $22. —— Phantom Pain By Arnon Grunberg Other Press, 286 pages, $22. —— In Arnon Grunberg’s novel “Story of My Baldness,” which has just been released in English translation, the Dutch novelist adopted a new literary persona: Marek van der Jagt, as…
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FALL BOOKS
Letters 1928-1946: Isaiah Berlin Edited by Henry Hardy Cambridge University Press, 755 pages, $40. ——- A couple of years ago, while visiting the offices of The Atlantic Monthly, I commented on my admiration of Isaiah Berlin to a friend of mine, Cullen Murphy, the magazine’s executive editor. Few modern thinkers strike me as being as…
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FALL BOOKS
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies By James Bamford Doubleday, 420 pages, $26.95. * * *| This past August, the news broke of an FBI probe into a possible leak to Israel of classified intelligence information via the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The leak…
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Gleanings
One in a series of occasional excerpts from books that catch our eye. The following is an excerpt from “Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt-Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts,” by Julian Rubinstein (Little, Brown). In it, Rubinstein offers a hilarious account of crime in the…
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FALL BOOKS
Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew By Neal Karlen Touchstone, 224 pages, $23. ——— Self-hatred can be fun — for other people, that is. That’s what Neal Karlen learned in college. He could use his profound Jewish self-loathing as a way of attracting mass quantities of shiksas at parties. While guitar-playing non-Jewish…
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FALL BOOKS
Kafka By Nicholas Murray Yale University Press, 440 pages, $30. ——– Kafka may have died childless, but Kafka’s biography is a series of begats, with each generation turning on its elders. In the beginning was Max Brod’s Judaic saint, a rapt visionary; the visionary Kafka begat the ironical Kafka of the absurdists and existentialists; that…
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An Older Mother
In this week’s portion, we read of Sarah, who, it is said, gave birth to her first child, Isaac, at age 90. I have often thought of Sarah, who waited endlessly for this miracle of childbirth, during my own childless years — and even more so after I finally did give birth later in life….
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What Litvaks Accomplished in Brazil
Alzheimer’s disease, an equal opportunity assassin of memory, felled movie star Rita Hayworth in 1987. “In the 1970’s, when Rita began to manifest strange symptoms, people said she was drunk when she’d get off a plane,” Barbara Walters told the 600 black-tie guests at the October 5 Alzheimer’s Association “Beauty Under the Big Top” Rita…
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