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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Built Judaism:
Architecture has been an important way in which Jews have defined themselves within their own community, as well as the pre-eminent means of projecting Jewish identity to the gentile world. Palaces of Prayer, a new exhibit at the Angel Orensanz Foundation on New York’s Lower East Side, includes 70 superb color prints of synagogues that…
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Emigrés Are Forming Decidedly Secular Identities; The Ancestral Faith, With a Side of Salami
This is the final installment in a three-part series on the challenges faced in the United States by immigrants from the former Soviet Union. A half an hour before a late-season minor league baseball game at Keyspan Park, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, a series of Russian performers took the field to dance…
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Ladies and Gentlemen, The Once and Future Yiddish Language
Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish By Dovid Katz Basic Books, 430 pages, $26.95. ——— Given the sentimentality of much recent writing on the subject, American Jews might be forgiven for believing that no one with a critical eye, or without sepia-colored glasses, possibly could write an entire book about Yiddish — much…
The Latest
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FALL BOOKS
The Final Solution: A Story of Detection By Michael Chabon. Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 144 pages, $16.95. —– Depending on their authors’ predilections, so-called “literary” novels are often unsettling, disturbing, enlightening or tragicomic. They are not, in the main, much fun. Fun is left to hacks, those genre writers who churn out the chick-lit blockbusters, weepy romances,…
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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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Wealth and Strife: Can Rich Relatives Live Together?
Lot and Abram, nephew and uncle, had migrated together from Mesopotamia to Canaan, and from Canaan down to Egypt. Now they returned together from Egypt to Canaan. Here, after traveling a long and arduous path, side by side, they reached a parting of the ways. Both men, the Torah tells us, had attained wealth. “Abram…
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Derrida | Wrestling With the Angel That Was Himself
Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint By Hélène Cixous Columbia University Press, 168 pages, $27.50 * * *| During the era of the Talmud, the period of the scholars known as the Amoraim (200-500 C.E.) was dedicated to the fleshing out of the sparse, cryptic pronouncements of their predecessors, the Tannaim. In…
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