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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My Favorite Demon
Writers are famous for their demons, whether they battle alcoholism, depression or the savage pain of a rotten youth. Isaac Bashevis Singer was no exception, except that his demons were demons. Unlike many writers, he made no secret of them: “I am possessed by my demons,” he declared to Commentary. Later, he made a telling…
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Hunting for the Magic
Whenever I’d ask my relatives where my great-grandparents had lived before immigrating to the United States, their answers always seemed strangely, frustratingly unspecific: A little village near Minsk, or maybe Pinsk, they would say. In the part of Russia that is now called Belarus, they thought. It may have been near a river, they conjectured….
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Two
After the taxi driver had been promised $25 plus a five dollar tip he became silent. The two passengers were silent, too. David Melnitz crammed his frail shape into a corner of the cab. He was dozing lightly, but every once in a while he opened one eye and looked through the window. The summer…
The Latest
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June 25, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • Rachel Hoffman was shot to death while she slept, by her husband, 34-four-year-old buttonhole-maker Samuel Hoffman of Broome Street in New York City. The early-morning murder took place while their three children and an unknown number of boarders still were asleep. Beat Officer McKay heard the children’s screams after the shots…
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The Making Of Martyrs
One day last spring was much like any other for Mohanned Abu Tayyun. He awoke early at his Nablus home, got dressed, washed his face and had his usual breakfast. Similarly, throughout Israel, most local families were occupied with workaday morning rituals: drinking coffee, reading the paper, doling goodbye pecks to loved ones. And yet…
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Love for the Fatherland, Tragically Unrequited
Impossible Love: Ascher Levy’s Longing for Germany By Roman Frister Phoenix Press, 359 pages, $15.95. * * *| My grandfather, a native of Dresden, adored Strauss waltzes, bratwurst and the opera “Die Fledermaus.” After the war, though he refused to buy a BMW, he always spoke with admiration of and largely embodied that distinct Germanic…
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Back to Bauhaus
To many tourists, Tel Aviv is merely an obligatory pit stop with an airport and a sunny beach, so they quickly move on to venerable Jerusalem for a dose of sightseeing and history. Having sprung up on the sand dunes mere decades ago, little in the newborn metropolis was considered worth preserving. But now that…
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Serpents, Seraphs and Memory
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Make a seraph and mount it on a standard…” [and so] Moses made a copper serpent and mounted it on a standard and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, he would look at the copper serpent and live. — Numbers 21:8-9 [King Hezekiah] also broke into pieces the…
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On Exhibit: The Infamous 1492 Decree
The original decree ordering the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 will come to New York this month, as part of an exhibit commemorating the 500th anniversary of the death of Queen Isabella I. Titled “Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Two Worlds (1451-1504),” the presentation also will feature illuminated manuscripts, rare documents, 17th-century paintings,…
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Please Touch the Art
Hours before her troupe’s first public performance, in 2002, Adina Tal faced a quandary unlike any posed to other directors: How would her cast members know that the audience was applauding? The scenario was not uncommon for the director of the theater group Nalaga’at (“Do Touch”), who, since forming the group in late 1999, has…
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To Get to Carnegie, Practice Your Yiddish
Putting a new spin on the old saw, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Moishe Rosenfeld, producer of the June 3 Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre Gala concert starring Neil Sedaka, told the 3,000-strong audience: “Practice, practice your Yiddish!” And so mameloshn bounced off that venerable hall’s acoustically famed walls with the Klezmatics launching the evening…
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