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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How Golf Became a Tool of Assimilation
I’ve gone to South Florida to give a talk. But first, there’s lunch with the relatives whom I haven’t seen in over a decade. We meet at “the club.” The centerpiece of my cousins’ lives, everything is oriented around it, from their homes to their calendars. We keep the conversation light, and talk of children…
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Music Being BFF’s at the New York Philharmonic
Critics aren’t liable for the headlines the copy desk gives to reviews, so no point chiding The New York Times’s James Oestreich for the burdened praise pinned on a rising Israeli pianist’s recent New York recital: “Inon Barnatan Soldiers Through Hallowed Works.” I winced, because the review itself described a “fascinating and rewarding” evening of…
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Willie Nelson, Itzhak Perlman and the 8 Greatest Gershwin Covers Ever
The Manhattan skyline appears on the cover of the new album, “Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin.” But the sounds come straight from the dry, dusty Southwest. Think slide guitars, harmonicas, and Nelson’s gritty-sweet voice floating like campfire smoke. You never get the sense that the singer is trying too hard as he growls and croons…
The Latest
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Martin Peretz, Outspoken Ex-New Republic Chief, Angrily Quits YIVO Board
After years of frustration with Jonathan Brent, the CEO and executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Marty Peretz, a board member and the former longtime owner of The New Republic, walked out of YIVO’s budget meeting on Monday March 7 and resigned. “I think Jonathan Brent is … irresponsible, dictatorial,” said Peretz…
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How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel
Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel By Leah Garrett Northwestern University Press, 275 pages, $34.95 Which works of Jewish literature do we remember, and which do we forget? The story we like to tell about American Jewish literature in the mid-20th century is that in the 1950s, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud…
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Film & TV This Must Be the Best Anne Frank Adaptation We’ve Ever Seen
It’s been nearly half a century since George Stevens’s multiple-Oscar-winning 1959 film “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the first and best known of the many film adaptations of “The Diary of a Young Girl,” was released. For many it remains the ultimate cinematic treatment of this classic of Holocaust literature. But that perception might be…
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For Harry Houdini’s Wife, Love Was Not a Magic Trick
Mrs. Houdini By Victoria Kelly Atria Books, 320 pages, $26 The epigraph of this novel, a fictionalized account of the love story between the escape artist Harry Houdini and his wife, Bess, is a quotation from W.B. Yeats: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” The Irish…
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Books The Making of ‘Falafel Nation’
Yael Raviv (above) is author of “Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (Studies of Jews in Society).” by Yael Raviv, is a work of culinary anthropology that looks at the founding of the state of Israel through the prism of food. The book (University of Nebraska Press) is the outgrowth…
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A Refusenik Survives With Love and Pride
I knew that the wedding of my daughter Aliyah would be an emotional journey – it is for every parent. But I think mine was a bit more tearful, more unfathomable, more heart-wrenching. Mine was that of a mother who came too close to losing her child, mine was of a mother whose nine months…
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Have Seltzer, Will Travel
For three and a half years, Steve Levine has been bringing me seltzer. Every second Saturday, while I’m still in pajamas, Steve shows up at my apartment with six glass bottles in a steel-reinforced wooden crate that looks like it was nailed together in the 1920s. Most of the bottles are clear, though some are…
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Atom Egoyan Tells a Tale of Two Genocides
The director Atom Egoyan was in a good mood. And why not? He was comfortably ensconced in a posh Los Angeles hotel the morning after his latest film, “Remember,” received an enthusiastic reception at a Museum of Tolerance screening. But his buzz was soon tempered as we discussed the film and I told him: “I…
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