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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Secrets of the Rebbetzin
I first met Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, the ageless widow of six Hasidic rabbis, at the fashionable loft of two well-known Brooklyn artists, one of whom was photographing the rebbetzin for an upcoming gallery show in Boston. Hadassah was radiant, an elegant creature in Italian shoes and tailored clothes (“I only wear couture,” she told me…
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Rock On, Moms
Josie has a keyboard she totes around the house. Periodically she puts it down, bangs on it like Mozart on a bender, scowls a bit and announces, “I’m working, like mama!” (To be truly like Mama, she’d have to curse a lot more as she typed. But close enough.) I know how fortunate I am…
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Celebrating Balanchine by Channeling His Antithesis
On June 18, Russian choreographer Boris Eifman will premiere his first ballet for the venerable New York City Ballet as part of a program to celebrate what would have been George Balanchine’s 100th birthday. At least in one respect, the match might seem to make sense: Eifman’s own company, the Eifman ballet, is based in…
The Latest
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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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Educate! Empower! Endow! And Entertain
“The myth is: We eat and non-Jews drink. Not so!” said Sylvie Sherman-Bloch to the 315 guests at the April 21 Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York benefit luncheon at The Pierre. A foundation grant recipient, the blond, attractive Sherman-Bloch, a recovering drug and alcohol addict, concluded with the unsettling query: “Is there an addict…
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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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