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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Looking Back August 6, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • It’s usually not easy to get a job in the trades run by the trusts. Typically, one has to be a friend or a relative of someone who already works in the industry. But because of a strike by the workers in the beef industry, the greenest of immigrants has been…
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They Love Him, They Love Him Not
The Path to Geneva By Yossi Beilin RDV Books/Akashic Books, 297 pages, $22.95 — Yossi Beilin commented recently on the ongoing turmoil in Gaza, saying that a strong Palestinian Authority was in Israel’s best interest. It was a relatively benign and quite anticipated remark, but nonetheless one that drew a torrent of insults and abuse…
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A Terrible, Awful Novel Of Great Importance
Siegfried By Harry Mulisch, translated by Paul Vincent Viking Press, 180 pages, $22.95. ——- When galleys for the massive Stalin biography by Montefiore first made the rounds, I got hold of a copy for my father, thinking that the subject would interest him as a survivor of Auschwitz and a former Bundist. He’s read many,…
The Latest
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Shalom, Wall: Jewish Artists Go Graffiti
The graffiti art on display at the Sunshine Factory café on Manhattan’s Lower East Side has the bold and gritty feel of New York’s streets. On one canvas, gold lettering floats above a field of green paint speckled with white and purple. In a drawing on the opposite wall, a break-dancer’s tracksuit and gold chains…
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Accessing the Inner Female
At dramatic moments, Moses accesses his inner female. In Numbers, which retells the story of the Israelites’ wanderings in the desert, the rabble gets fired up about the culinary deprivation of having nothing to eat but manna. “O that we had meat to eat!” they cry to Moses in Numbers 11:4-5. “We remember the fish…
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Eli Wallach Knows His Lines
Bypassing his usually well-researched curriculum vitae of his interview guests, Rabbi William Berkowitz let Eli Wallach explain himself to the July 12 overflow crowd at the Center for Jewish History. “I tell journalists. ‘Please don’t put my age in,’” the 89-year-old Wallach said. “It’s a handicap for directors who think I can’t remember lines.” He…
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Al Harei Catskill: The Vacations of Yore
THE WONDERS OF AMERICA Vacations, like women’s fashions, are ever changing. One year, cruises are all the rage; the next, it’s trekking in the Himalayas. Earlier generations were no less impervious to what was in and what was out. As early as the 1920s, increasingly affluent American Jews began to forsake the humble bungalow colonies…
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PSALM 151
Hapax Legomena I covered you and cover you I covet you and uncover you My dream intent to discover you seems clear as a snowflake dresses you and undresses you an orange hand on your breast unless it’s you a purple simple hand on your hand is less than you you covered and recovered you…
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Simple and Delightful: They Don’t All Do That
What is the nature of true love? If there is such a thing, how to understand infidelity? One of the most famously cynical and humane answers is “Cosi Fan Tutte” (“They All Do That”), and it is the last of three operas that Mozart wrote in collaboration with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. In this comedy…
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The Beastie Boys Grow Up
The question posed by “To the 5 Boroughs” (Capitol), the sixth album by the Beastie Boys, is: Can irreverence and social-consciousness coexist? As the three rappers push 40 — Adam Yauch, aka MCA, is 39; Mike Diamond, aka Mike D, is 38, and Adam Horovitz, aka Adrock, is 37 — it was perhaps inevitable that…
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Honoring the President’s Mensch
“As a Jew I have found myself becoming angrier and angrier at the current times we face,” declared Kenneth Bialkin, chairman of the board of the America-Israel Friendship League at its July 1 lecture — “Agenda Setting in the Middle East: Media, the Third Party in the Conflict Between the Israelis and the Palestinians”— held…
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