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 Modernist Artists Survived (and Sometimes Thrived) Under Nazis
● Artists under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany By Jonathan Petropoulos Yale University Press, 424 pages, $40 Nearly 70 years after the end of World War II, newly available archives and probing scholarship are sharpening our perspective on daily life, culture, political infighting, and collaboration and resistance in the Third Reich. Jonathan Petropoulos’s…
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Books Times Names Best Jewish Books of Year
Photo: Martyna Starosta (JTA) — The New York Times Book Review published its “100 Notable Books of 2014” on its website Tuesday and, not surprisingly, given the whole People of the Book moniker, a number of the fiction and nonfiction books highlighted this year are of Jewish interest. (The number of Jewish authors on general…
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Of Frum Hippies, West Bank Settlements and Leo Tolstoy
● The Hilltop By Assaf Gavron Translated by Steven Cohen Scribner, 464 pages, $26 If you are hoping for the Israeli ‘War and Peace’ from Assaf Gavron’s new novel, you will be disappointed. But, as you recover from that setback, you can take comfort in Gavron’s actual achievement. For while the heft of “The Hilltop”…
The Latest
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She’s Living in Her Own Private (Jewish) Idaho
I was born in Washington, D.C., where my mother called from her hospital bed to put me on the waiting list for a good nursery school. My own kids were born at home in Idaho (one in the bedroom, one in the living room), where getting them into a good preschool was a little less…
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200 Years Later, Remembering Anti-Semitism of Marquis de Sade
December 2 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of the Marquis de Sade, although Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” “Fifty Shades of Grey” by E. L. James, and the pop star Rihanna’s 2011 song “S&M” suggest that for some, sadism retains its chic. The French Jewish essayist Alain Finkielkraut asked in a 2012…
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159 Thoughts We Had While Watching ‘The Red Tent’
When Anita Diamant’s novel “The Red Tent” hit bookstores in 1997, Jewish women couldn’t devour it fast enough. The book focuses on Jacob and Leah’s daughter Dinah, who only gets one sentence in the Bible. Famously, it tries to upend the narrative of her rape, giving her a voice and a sense of agency that…
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Books Some of Martin Amis’s Best Friends Are Jews. Really.
● The Zone of interest By Martin Amis Knopf, 320 pages, $26.95 Martin Amis’s new novel “The Zone of Interest,” which is set in post-Wannsee Auschwitz, is dedicated “[t]o those who survived and to those who did not; to the memory of Primo Levi… and to the memory of Paul Celan.” The dedication continues: “to…
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Books A Lost World in an Old Box of Film
In 2009, writer Glenn Kurtz was sifting through a closet in his parent’s Florida home when he discovered a reel of 16mm Kodachrome color film in a musty cardboard box that had belonged to his grandparents, David and Liza Kurtz. As prosperous Jewish American tourists, the Kurtz’s decided to take a six-week summer vacation through…
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69 Years After the War, an Artist Makes Another Debut
Tipping his head to the left, avoiding banging into the ceiling, my tall dad, Jay Moss, would go down the steps to our Long Island basement, after many family dinners. At the other side of the large cement floor barely lit by one fixture, he would tighten the two long fluorescent bulbs above his 10-foot-long…
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Physicists of Two Masters
● Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler By Philip Ball University of Chicago Press, 320 pages, $30 In his 1998 play “Copenhagen,” Michael Frayn used the Heisenberg uncertainty principle — a cornerstone of modern physics — as a metaphor for the impossibility of pinning down historical facts when memories…
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Could Spoken Language Be the Key to Unification?
A newly published book, Norman Berdichevsky’s “Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language,” is an excellent survey of its subject. In just 200 pages, Berdichevsky manages to touch succinctly but informatively on nearly every aspect of Zionism’s successful revival of Hebrew as the spoken language it had not been for two millennia…
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