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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Value: More Than a Matter of Money
‘She’s worth her weight in gold.” “You look like a million dollars.” Our language often attributes measurable monetary value to human beings. In a world in which these were not merely figures of speech, what would be the actual worth of a human being? How could one tell? Who would decide? In the first eight…
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Philadelphia Story
For someone who has searched out the traces of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, the story is hauntingly familiar: a cemetery “neglected, vandalized, and filled with trash, listed on the City’s roster of abandoned properties,” as the words of a fundraising appeal put it. Nestled among the almost total disarray are toppled memorial stones, some…
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May 7, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • Reports from the Pale of Settlement indicate that already bad conditions for the Jews are worsening. In Bialystock, hundreds of unemployed Jewish laborers have been reduced to begging in the streets for crusts of bread. From Vitebsk comes news that local storekeepers are no longer able to buy on credit and…
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April 30, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • Delancey Street resident Frank Ginzberg, a tailor by trade, walked into a grocery store on Third Avenue run by his aunt and uncle, William and Mathilda Broner. Seeing Mrs. Broner at the register, Ginzberg asked where his uncle was. When his aunt answered, “He’s out. What do you need him for?”…
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Taking the Gloss Off of ‘Shiksa Toes’
Boy, have we got shiksa problems. For millennia, Jewish men and women have treated gentile women like the half-bird, half-women Sirens of Greek mythology: beautiful, seductive creatures that have the power to draw the ship of community onto the rocks of assimilation. However, unlike the mythic Sirens, gentile women are human beings who live and…
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How Personal Is It
Double Vision: A Self-Portrait By Walter Abish Alfred A. Knopf, 220 pages, $24. Walter Abish’s latest book is subtitled “A Self-Portrait,” and though this description suits it better than the usual “A Memoir,” “Self-Portraits” might have been even more accurate. “Double Vision” combines two alternating narratives, “The Writer-To-Be” and “The Writer.” The former details Abish’s…
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April 23, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • When firefighters arrived to put out a fire at the Greenberg residence in Antakolye, a small suburb of Vilna, they found that the house had been ransacked and the family slaughtered. The body of Leyb Greenberg was found burned; his hands had been tied behind his back, his throat slashed. More…
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April 16, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • While the rent strike on the Lower East Side is still in full swing, numerous landlords have shown up at the offices of the Forward to declare that they will not be raising rents. The strikes, which are multiplying by the day, are succeeding, and the strikers — simple working families…
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Left Alone, at the Edge of the World
Lifesaving Letters: A Child’s Flight From the Holocaust By Milena Roth University of Washington Press, 192 pages, $24.95. * * *| Little Milena Roth and her parents lived an ordinary middle-class life in a pleasant part of a Jewish district in Prague. It was a large, close-knit family with grandparents and many cousins. Milena remembers…
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April 9, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • More than a hundred Jewish homes were destroyed in Homel during a recent pogrom. The Jews, however, led by a number of butchers, defended themselves against the pogromists and managed to wound a few. Although many Jewish businesses were destroyed, no one was killed. In a related story, word on the…
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April 2, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • The atmosphere in Bialystock is increasingly restless following mass demonstrations against the czarist regime during which a young Jewish revolutionary shot the police commissioner. The shooter was quickly apprehended and, with the interior minister’s stamp of approval, was sentenced to death by public hanging in the middle of city’s marketplace. All…
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