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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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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December 3, 2004
100 Years Ago • Oscar Adler, a resident of Avenue B, was arrested after police found him hiding out in a Brooklyn, N.Y., hotel. Adler, 23, ran a banking concern called Novak & Co., through which many Galician and Hungarian Jews sent money and ship tickets to their relatives in the Old Country. It was…
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What’s Going on At the New York Times?
Here’s a test for you: What publication carried a lengthy article on its front page in April, describing how conservative critic David Horowitz seeks to end discrimination against conservative students and faculty at colleges and universities through creation of an academic bill of rights? Was it the New York Post? The New York Sun? Was…
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Praying at the Temple of Traditional Jazz
For Ben Jaffe, the future is all about updating the past…………………………………………. Jaffe was born into musical royalty. His parents, Allan and Sandra, founded New Orleans’s world-famous Preservation Hall in 1961, after they fell in love with the Crescent City while returning from their honeymoon in Mexico. They uprooted from Pennsylvania and, to their surprise, discovered…
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Heeding the Call That Haunts
Tattoo for a Slave By Hortense Calisher Harcourt, 336 pages, $24. ——- ‘Your grandmother never kept slaves.”………… With these words spoken to a young, naive Hortense Calisher by her father, born the seventh child of eight in 1861 in Richmond, Va., this unusual book opens. A “tattoo” can be a bugle call, a drum roll…
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Ornaments of the World
They stand only 15 inches tall but bear the weight of Jewish history. I’m referring to a pair of silver-and-gilded rimonim (Torah ornaments) of 19th-century German provenance whose recent arrival in New York was celebrated by Congregation Habonim, a Conservative synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. These delicately worked ritual objects were first commissioned by…
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Hollywood Looming: Allen’s ‘A Second Hand Memory’
Once upon a time it was a sacred ritual: the annual pilgrimage to see the new Woody Allen movie. The full-page ad would appear in the Sunday New York Times with nothing more than the title and the list of stars. The following Friday, long lines of hard-core devotees would appear in front of the…
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Jewish Dogs and the Web Sites They Love
The Jewish pet is coming up in the world. Last year we reported on “bark mitzvahs,” and synagogues around the country have began to hold annual “Blessings of the Animals” to coincide with a reading of the story of Noah’s Ark, at which pets can receive a certificate and a Hebrew name. But what would…
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