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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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…
The Latest
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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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Jew on a Hot Tin Roof
● Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh By John Lahr W. W. Norton & Company, 784 pages, $39.95 An energetically gossipy biography of playwright Tennessee Williams has been written by the son of Irving Lahrheim, better known as Bert Lahr, filmdom’s Cowardly Lion. Williams, who wrote “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and…
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A Work of Heartbreaking Genius and Erudition
The crisis facing American Jews today is the result of the comfort of their surroundings. The barriers to assimilation Jews faced in the past are now gone, if not reversed, rendering the border between liberal Jew and non-Jew a thing of the past. And yet, one author, raised in liberal Judaism’s bosom, has been quietly…
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A Monument to the World Before the Holocaust
“At the end of the world, there is a high mountain, and on that mountain, there is a huge rock, and from that huge rock a pure spring comes gushing out. And at the other end of the world, there is the heart of the world… And the heart of the world gazes and gazes…
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The Voodoo That Jews Do
It’s not every day that a Voodoo priestess kicks you out of her temple for asking about the lost books of Moses. But as we stood in Miriam Chamani’s Voodoo Spiritual Temple in New Orleans, asking about the connection between Voodoo and Judaism, she grew more and more agitated. “Would you go up to the…
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Yiddish פֿאַר וואָס הערט מען ניט וועגן דעם גלעצנדיקן וווּקס פֿון דער ישׂראל־בערזע? Why aren’t we hearing about the dramatic growth of the Israeli stock market?
וואָלט דער אָפּרוף געווען אַנדערש, ווען דער ציל פֿון די טעראָריסטן וואָלט ניט געווען ייִדן, נאָר אַן אַנדער גרופּע?
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