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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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 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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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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March 26, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • A large number of Lower East Side tenement houses are boiling after their landlords put tenants on notice that their rent was to be raised. It’s been discussed in every Jewish tenement house, in every sweatshop and throughout the Jewish quarter, and, as a result, a massive rent strike has begun…
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March 19, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • A terrible commotion occurred during a performance in the American Theater after a gunman shot at some of the actors onstage from Box C. The two shots caused a panic in the packed theater. The unidentified gunman, whose motives are unknown, immediately disappeared. Coincidentally, Yiddish-theater actor and director Jacob Adler was…
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March 12, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • A private letter has reached the Forward from St. Petersburg that describes the terrible situation that awaits those sent to the frontlines of the raging Russo-Japanese war. A large contingent of mainly Jewish doctors — who it seems were forcibly drafted — was shipped off to the front from St. Petersburg….
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The Not-So-Supreme Being?
More than two decades after Harold Kushner’s “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” became a best seller, another rabbi-author has reopened the vexing question of whether divine justice exists in the universe. This time, it’s Benjamin Blech, weighing in with his book, “If God is Good, Why is the World So Bad?” (Simcha Press,…
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POETRY FOUND
When renowned Forward cartoonist Ben Katchor’s telephone fell off his desk and smashed open, he discovered that the plastic shell of the phone was practically empty, with the exception of several small lead weights. These weights were the inspiration for his tragicomedy musical theater production “The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or The Friends of…
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March 5, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • A number of novel scams have hit the Lower East Side in recent days. For example, a doctor showed up at the door of Mr. and Mrs. Mendel Lort of Prince Street and told the couple he had been sent by the Board of Health to determine whether the two were…
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February 27, 2004
100 YEARS AGO • In a story that exemplifies the inhumanity of Russia’s antisemitism, a Jewish doctor who lived with his family in Kiev volunteered to serve in the medical corps of the Russian army, since the lack of doctors on the front in Siberia is well-known. But a Jewish family cannot live outside the…
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