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 David Javerbaum Became Ghost Writer for God
David Javerbaum’s list of accomplishments stretches from Earth all the way to heaven. He’s won 11 Emmys and two Peabody awards as writer and producer of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” While there, he helped author “America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction” (winner of the Thurber Prize for Humor) and its…
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Keeping a Close Watch on the Zombie Wars of Chicago
The Making of Zombie Wars By Aleksandar Hemon Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $26 Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel “The Making of Zombie Wars” is preceded by two epigraphs. The first, attributed to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, reads, “The mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the body endures.” The second…
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Why the World Still Needs Saul Bellow
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune By Zachary Leader Knopf, 832 pages, $40 ‘Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Saul Bellow asked on his deathbed. By “man,” of course, he meant mensch. Zachary Leader, Bellow’s new biographer, answers Bellow’s dying question: “Both.” Bellow was a jerk: Famously prickly and…
The Latest
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Why My Father Wouldn’t Let Me Read Marjorie Morningstar
When I was a young teenager in the late 1970s, my father forbade me to read “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk’s 1955 novel chronicling the eponymous Marjorie’s coming of age in the 1930s. Marjorie, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked their way out of the Bronx and to Manhattan’s Upper West Side,…
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Investigating Yavneh’s Bustling Drug Scene — from 3,000 Years Ago
Before the central Israeli town of Yavneh became a residence for police officers and IDF officers, it featured a varied drug scene, including many different kinds of intoxicants and hallucinogens. Long before. These substances were used 3,000 years ago, during the Iron Age, and were an integral part of culture and ritual for the Philistines,…
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The Last Jews of Pike Place
The stamp of Sephardic Jews on Seattle is strong, from Benaroya Hall, where the Seattle Symphony plays, to the real estate holdings of the Alhadeff family, best known for the now-closed Longacres race track. But the ink of Sephardic influence is fading from Pike Place Market. The oldest operating market in the country, the biggest…
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Has Dr. Ruth Gone From Sex Pioneer to Angry Bubbe?
The Doctor Is In: Dr. Ruth on Love, Life, and Joie de Vivre By Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer Amazon Publishing $14.95 206 Pages In the past, I’ve gotten some good life lessons from my 86-year-old grandmother. They have ranged from “survival doesn’t ask if you’re a swine” (that’s how she explains getting out of Theresienstadt…
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Etgar Keret Finds Redemption
The Seven Good Years: A Memoir By Etgar Keret Riverhead Books, 192 pages, $26.95 For readers entranced by earlier encounters with Etgar Keret’s enchantingly unsettling portrayals of the absurdities of the human condition, the appearance of his memoir is surely cause for celebration. A recent collection of stories, “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door,” was…
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Of World’s Fairs, Cellphones and 10 Other Facts About Jewish Illinois
1) 297,885 Jews live in Illinois. 2) The first recorded Jewish resident in Illinois was John Hays who lived in Cahokia, near the Missouri border. He was a farmer, trader, and soldier, and served as St. Clair County’s postmaster until 1798, when he was appointed sheriff. 3) Music entrepreneur Sol Bloom developed the Midway Plaisance,…
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A Slice of a New Life
Aunt Linda had stocked up on kosher food to last for the duration of the Sabbath. But when Saturday night came around, there was no more kosher food left and I was hungry. On Saturday evening, we couldn’t find an open kosher restaurant, so I suggested that Aunt Linda, my elder brother Israel and I…
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Broadway’s 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt Be a Wise-Ass
Two years ago, I took a morning off work to attend my childhood rabbi’s funeral. Ours wasn’t an observant family, and I really didn’t have any relationship with the rabbi beyond my decades-ago bar mitzvah, but Jehiel Orenstein, of Congregration Beth El in South Orange, N.J., was a nice man and a good man, a…
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