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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Circassian: A Most Difficult Language
The other day, I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office in Haifa, when three people walked in and sat behind me. Two were men dressed in Western clothes, one looking to be in his 30s and the other in his 50s or 60s; the third was a woman in her 20s of…
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A Holocaust Romance Tied to a Necklace, Filled With Clichés
Love and Treasure By Ayelet Waldman Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95 A historical novel, the Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács argued, should reach only as far backwards as the era of the author’s grandparents. That is because novelists build not balanced panoramas, but rather individual portraits. Real human beings are unrealistic, because they are improbably idiosyncratic….
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Palestine Jews on Lockdown Following Violence
1914 • 100 years ago Betrayed by Sister and Husband Nine years ago, Sam and Ida Weiner were married and living happily in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he worked as a carpenter in a trim factory. The Weiners had three lovely children: 7-year-old Rosie, 5-year-old Sam and 2-year-old Saraleh. About nine months ago,…
The Latest
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An Empty Bob Dylan Biography
Dylan: The Biography By Dennis McDougal Turner Publishing Company, 540 pages, $35 ‘What is this sh–?” Greil Marcus famously asked in his Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan’s most reviled album, “Self Portrait.” Throughout my reading of “Dylan: The Biography,” by Dennis McDougal, I’ve been asking myself the same question. It purports to be “the…
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Books Yiddish Tomes Go Digital With DIY Scanner
It’s a scenario that the Yiddish writers of yore could never have predicted, and yet by which they likely would have been tickled: Today, their work is being digitized with the help of a home-made scanner built by a former Baptist from Indiana who lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. As of mid…
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Eli Wallach’s 10 Greatest Roles (A Completely Biased List)
Eli Wallach, who died yesterday at 98, once joked that he had played hundreds of roles onstage and in movies, but was perhaps most remembered for playing the role of the villain Mr. Freeze on the old “Batman” TV series. Although Wallach’s “Batman” turn was a memorable one, we’ve cho]sen to look back at some…
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A Remembrance of Eli Wallach
I first met Eli Wallach one evening in a restaurant in the Peninsula Hotel. He was almost 90 then, and he needed someone to edit the autobiography he was writing. We sipped chamomile tea and he told me some of his stories — how he had gone out dancing with Marilyn Monroe; how he had…
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Jewish Civil Rights Activists Killed in Mississippi
1914 • 100 years ago Bagel Monopoly of Norfolk Street Anyone who hangs around the corner of New York City’s Hester and Norfolk Streets at about 5 a.m. knows of the boisterous baked-good market there, where Jews and Jewesses sell all manner of challahs, cakes, rolls and all kinds of other good things. This writer…
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‘Bearded Lady’ and ‘Gender Terrorist’ Take Performance Art Beyond the Fringes
Stomping across the stage in a disheveled blond wig, cheesy pink boots, and a jean skirt adorned with raccoon tails, performance artist Rose Wood is every bit the trailer-park hooker attempting to sell her wares. Enraged and desperate, she strips off her torn and tied T-shirt, revealing nude breasts, and when that doesn’t work, she…
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How We Know the Bible Was Written by Human Hands
● How the Bible Became Holy By Michael Satlow Yale University Press, 368 pages, $35 ● The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis By Joel Baden Yale University Press, 392 pages, $65 ● The Formation of the Hebrew Canon By Timothy Lim Yale University Press, 304 pages, $45 According to a Gallup poll…
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What’s the Difference Between Mass Killing and Genocide?
Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about “neo-Nazi” as a term for anti-Arab hooligans among Israel’s settler population, explaining why I thought it inappropriate. Because the Nazis, I said, have rightly come to represent the ultimate in monstrously hateful human conduct, it has become common to invoke them in condemning all forms of violent…
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