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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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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Gleanings
Below is an excerpt from “Survivors: Seven Short Stories,” by Chava Rosenfarb, which will be out this October from Cormorant Books Inc. I was happy to emigrate to Canada, which I considered a land “far from God and from people” — by which I meant former concentration camp inmates — where I would be unlikely…
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A Boatload of Languor And Dreaminess
House on the River: A Summer Journey By Nessa Rapoport Harmony Books, 146 pages, $22. ——– In literature’s most ambitious exploration of the collision between Canada and the Jews, “Solomon Gursky Was Here,” novelist Mordecai Richler conjured Ephraim Gursky, a highly Bronfmanesque patriarch and explorer who so influences Inuit tribes that they don taleisim long…
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You Must Not Remain Indifferent
Deuteronomy 22:1-3 contains the admirable commandment to return any lost ox, sheep, ass or garment that you come across and, if necessary, to go out of your way to do this. And then, at the end of Deuteronomy 22:3, the point is generalized by a command that reads, in the older and more literal translations:…
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When They Came For Martin Niemoller
Surely, it is a curiously compassionate thing to congratulate a 53-year-old Christian minister for his impressive achievement in 1945 of having finally developed into a defender of Jews at the end of the Holocaust. Last, and most tellingly, Niemoller was in prison on Kristallnacht, that November day in 1938, when, among other appalling antisemitic acts,…
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August 20, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • A greenhorn has disappeared from Ellis Island. Velvl Koifman (Yerukhem Osher Yankls), of Britshan, Bessarabia, arrived from Europe last Tuesday on the ship Rotterdam and has disappeared without a trace. There is evidence that toughs from the Beef Trust took him, together with a number of other immigrants, directly to Chicago…
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AAbuzz With Bugs
Swat, squash, slap, smash, smack: Faced with the high whine of flying invaders, teeming masses of tiny creatures or the sickly sheen of hard brown insect shells, we’ll happily whack them, fumigate them, chemical-bomb them, even flash-freeze them. Never mind that we may share a common protean ancestor with the creepy-crawlies, or that we all…
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Remembering the Hebron Riots, 1929
Seventy-five years ago, a two-week orgy of pogroms took place in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Safed, Hebron and a number of smaller locales in British-ruled Palestine, at the end of which 83 Jews had been killed and hundreds wounded. Pogroms are not spontaneous events, and those of August 1929 were no exception. The affair began August…
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