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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Malamud’s New Life
In conversation with a friend, I once tried to account for my particular fascination with Philip Roth’s early novel “Letting Go.” In attempting to characterize the book and how it stood apart in Roth’s oeuvre, I blurted out: “‘Letting Go’ is Roth’s Richard Yates book.” What I meant, I guess, was that for one book…
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A Torah Scholar With a Rock-Star Following
For most scholars, Midrash is an analysis of or commentary on the text of the Bible. But to Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, the literary and Torah scholar with an enormous following on several continents, Midrash is “the repressed unconscious of the Torah.” The difference speaks volumes. Specifically, Zornberg sees Midrash as coming out of what the…
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The Men in My Life
THE WONDERS OF AMERICA As the summer gives way to September, and with it the advent of Rosh Hashanah, my thoughts turn to those who will not be on hand this year to usher in the Jewish New Year: my father-in-law, Yaakov (née Peretz Yaakov) Joselit, and my favorite uncle, Bob (née Baruch) Weissman. Apart…
The Latest
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Justice, Served: A Tennis Story
The backgrounds of tennis partners Althea Gibson and Angela Buxton were radically different. The daughter of share-croppers, Gibson was born in South Carolina and raised in New York City’s Harlem. British and Jewish, Buxton was the daughter of entertainment impresario Harry Buxton, who made his fortune by breaking the bank at a casino. On and…
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You Spin Me Right ’Round A New Book Laces Into the Marketing of Politics
All the President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media and the Truth By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan Touchstone, 352 pages, $11.20. * * *| Many people have accused President Bush of misleading the American public. The editors of Spinsanity.com, a nonpartisan Web site “dedicated to debunking political spin and fact-checking the media,”…
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PSALM 151
In his epigraph, poet Merrill Leffler raises William Carlos Williams’s bold claim that men die miserably for lack of what is in poetry. It’s a claim that many practical folks would dismiss on the face of it, for if the news of our world is purely a matter of dollars and sense, then how much…
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Old Soldiers Who Never Fade: Peres Runs as Laborites Rebel
TEL AVIV — As the latest power struggle in Israel’s Labor Party unfolds, it is hard to tell without a peek at the calendar whether the year is 2004, 1994 or even 1984. There is Shimon Peres, 81, hardly changed in his looks from the energetic prime minister of two decades ago, hotly debating with…
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August 27, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • When Ida Bukhovitsh arrived on Ellis Island two months ago, one Mendl Sheinfeld, whom she knew from her town in Russia, met her. Sheinfeld signed for her, saying he was her cousin and that he would help her find work. He then took her back to his Lower East Side apartment,…
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Survivor: Rosh Hashanah
Reality TV casting call: One Jewish family needed, substantially observant and slightly neurotic, for test of strategy and endurance. There will be no island to get kicked off of and no cow’s testicles to eat, but you may have to face… the bar mitzvah caterer. That’s right, folks, someone finally realized what a challenge it…
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The Work of a Worthy Diarist
The Journals of Yaacov Zipper, 1950-1982: The Struggle for Yiddishkayt Translated from the Yiddish and edited by Mervin Butovsky and Ode Garfinkle McGill/Queens University Press, 192 pages, $39.95. * * *| The appearance of the random, private journals of the obscure principal of a Canadian Yiddish school does not suggest an auspicious literary event. But…
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Where Have All the Jews Gone?
When Toronto-based writer Matt Cohen died in 1999, he had just completed a memoir titled, “Typing: A Life in 26 Keys” (Random House, Canada 2000). Alongside its sharply drawn portrait of the Toronto literary and counter-cultural scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, “Typing” included a provocative challenge to the Canadian literary establishment, which…
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