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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Was Our Greatest Composer-Critic an Unrepentant Anti-Semite?
Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles 1940-1954 By Virgil Thomson Library of America, 1,200 pages, $45 Kansas City, Missouri-born composer Virgil Thomson is called “America’s greatest composer-critic” in this collection, which addresses the issue of Thomson’s relationship with rival Jewish composers. Brought up in a Southern Baptist family in Missouri, Thomson produced some admirable works such as…
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Where We’re Going This Summer
Oxford, England When my youngest daughter began working on a master’s degree at Oxford University last fall, she became the seventh generation of women in my family to live for an extended period in England. So my husband and I will take a long weekend in June and make a pilgrimage of sorts, back to…
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Naomi Wilzig, Founder of Erotic Art Museum, Dies at 80
Jewish grandmothers don’t usually wear penis necklaces or hang signs announcing “Buying Erotica” while antique shopping. But, Naomi Wilzig, who died in her sleep on Tuesday at 80, was anything but your typical bubbe. Wilzig was the founder of the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, Florida, the largest privately-held erotic art collection in…
The Latest
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Moscow on the Delaware
Sixty-five years ago, my father and I stood hand in hand on the third-floor balcony of our three-level row house in Washington, D.C., watching a large house fire raging somewhere beyond the alley. I was 9 years old, and I still remember how tightly he held my hand and how deeply engrossed he was. He…
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The Life and Death of Jewish Lithuania
● The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police Translated and edited by Samuel Schalkowsky Indiana University Press, 416 pages, $35 When we think of Lithuanian Jewry, we tend to think of Vilnius, “The Yerushalaim of Litte,” for its fame as a Jewish religious and intellectual center, its great scholars, and its contribution to…
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Philip Glass Settles Some Old Scores
Channeling the good Jewish son he never quite was, Philip Glass gives the first line of his new memoir to his mother: “If you go to New York City to study music,” she warns her youngest on the occasion of his graduation from the University of Chicago in 1957, “you’ll end up like your uncle…
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So, Why Are Bob Dylan’s Videos So Violent Anyway?
If you’ve been watching Bob Dylan videos lately (I know it’s a select group, but if you’re reading this article, you’re probably in it), you may have noticed that a number of them are violent. Seriously violent. Gunshots, stabbing, torture violent. You may have wondered, what’s up with that? The three most violent — “Beyond…
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Could Rahm Emanuel Lose Chicago Race to ‘Hanukkah Harry’ Challenger?
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in a race to retain his job against Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a career politician with strong ties to Chicago’s progressive community. And, the upcoming Chicago mayoral election being held on Tuesday, April 7, has been characterized by some as Jews for Jesus versus Jews for “Mayor 1 Percent.” After ailing…
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All of Abraham Lincoln’s Chosen Friends
Abraham Jonas, the attorney, and Issachar Zacharie, the foot doctor, weren’t Lincoln’s only Jewish friends. Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell also illuminate the nature of the president’s close relationship with three other Jewish men. Julius Hammerslough, another clothing merchant, was probably Lincoln’s first Jewish friend. He attended the president’s 1861 inauguration and was a…
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Of Joe Biden, the Heimlich Maneuver and 8 Other Facts About (Jewish) Delaware
1) 15,100 Jews live in Delaware. 2) Former Delaware Senator and current vice-president Joe Biden ran afoul of the Anti-Defamation League in September, 2014, for using the term “Shylocks” to refer to people who engage in nefarious business practices. 3) In 1971, businessman Irving Shapiro became the first person outside of the Dupont family to…
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Alice in Anti-Semitic Land
● Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle By Edward Wakeling I. B. Tauris, 480 pages, $49 Most biographies of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the English logician and Anglican deacon who signed “Alice in Wonderland” with the pen name Lewis Carroll, misunderstood their subject entirely. In his new book, Edward Wakeling persuasively argues that Carroll was…
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