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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Are All Jewish Men Shylocks?
Shylock Is My Name By Howard Jacobson Hogarth Shakespeare, 288 pages, $25 What to do with Shylock? I was pondering this question recently while browsing in a Barnes and Noble, when I noticed that they’d helpfully labeled the Humor shelf, “Books that make you laugh.” Especially with regard to some of them (“What Would Jesus…
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Why Isn’t There More of a Hoohah About Kosher Bacon?
A recent culinary phenomenon has caught my eye: the steady advance of “kosher bacon,” a meat product that looks and tastes like the real thing. What intrigues me is not its popularity, or the ways in which once intact boundaries between kosher cuisine and its nonkosher counterparts have been increasingly erased. What I find most…
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My Search for the ‘Male Shiksa’
I told him it was a double mitzvah to screw on Shabbat. SportsCenter on mute, music theory textbooks open in our laps. His pencil suspended above the fill-in-the-scale exercise. The Oklahoma goy and his new, exotic Jewish girlfriend. I relished the role. “What’s a mitzvah?” he asked. “A good deed.” There are 613 them, I…
The Latest
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60 Valentine’s Days Later, Dorothy and Al Laugh, Fuss and Remember
Al Hampel calls his wife Dorothy “Nurse Ratchett.” When they met 60 years ago, she supervised his work as a copywriter, and ran a tight ship. Today, at Brookdale Senior Living, she’s famous for her feisty attitude. Humor is one of the things that’s kept them together. Al makes fun of Dorothy for wearing gold…
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For Shabbat, a Flower Ritual of Her Own
‘Oh, and along with the salad, could you bring some flowers for the table?” my then-fiancé asked. It was the first Shabbat we would be making “together” since my move from Minneapolis to join him in New York. Because my microscopic Manhattan kitchen was even smaller and harder to work in than his, we had…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago A case came before Judge Rosalsky in which one Louie Belish of 148 Norfolk Street in Manhattan stood accused of seducing a young girl and forcing her into a life of prostitution. The girl, known only as “Annie,” is a 17-year old brunette with whom he lived at 29 Stuyvesant Place….
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Books The 14 Most Romantic Lines in Jewish Literature
Valentine’s Day is upon us, and ignoring the holiday’s relatively morbid roots in favor of its relatively charming modern incarnation, what better way to celebrate than with the romantic musings of some beloved Jewish writers? Should you be in need of lofty-sounding fodder with which to celebrate your loved ones — or woo those you’d…
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Music The True Story of Genya Ravan, a Jewish Rock ‘n Roll Survivor for the Ages
If for nothing else, Genyusha Zelkowitz aka Genya “Goldie” Ravan should be known for her hits recorded under the name Goldie and the Gingerbreads in the early 1960s. The group was the first all-female band signed to a major label – anticipating by over a decade bands like the Runaways and later on the entire…
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Before the War, They Found a Last Resort in Ostend
Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark By Volker Weidermann, translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway Pantheon, 176 pages, $24.95 In the summer of 1936, Nazi Germany was preparing for the propaganda triumph of the Olympics, and Spain was exploding into civil war. Meanwhile, in the Belgian North Sea…
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The 100-Story Man Hits His Milestone
This February, Haim Watzman reaches an unplanned milestone: The Israeli-American writer will publish his 100th short story in The Jerusalem Report — in English. When Watzman moved to Israel in the 1970s, he planned to write exclusively in Hebrew. It was part of the “Zionist ideology,” he said, and was an opportunity to show off…
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How Yiddish Blossomed After the Holocaust
Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture After the Holocaust By Jan Schwarz Wayne State University Press, 360 pages, $46.99 In 1954, while passing through the Uruguayan capital city of Montevideo, the Yiddish literary editor Mark Turkov met a Jewish journalist from Paris who had begun writing a book about his experience in Auschwitz. Turkov invited him…
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