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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Zayd Dohrn’s ‘Muckrakers’ Is Ripped From His Radical Royalty Bloodline
Zayd Dohrn’s ripped-from-the-headlines “Muckrakers” is a drama about transparency in the digital age that asks: When does disclosure of the public and personal become too much openness? The one-act play was inspired in part by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’ exposure of Chelsea Manning’s Iraq and Afghan war revelations. Assange’s alleged sex scandal also informed the…
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‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Turns 50 With an All-Star Celebration
Zalmen Mlotek, artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre (aka Folksbiene) doesn’t seem too surprised — indeed, he sounds matter-of-fact — that the iconic theater is marking its 100th birthday and still going strong. But, he acknowledges its founders, who opened the theater’s doors on the Lower East Side for Yiddish speaking Eastern European immigrants, would…
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My Father, My Self
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Hamlet, Act II, scene 2 It was his suggestion. We could work together on his obituary: father and son. In his final days, it would be another way to connect and smooth things over if there were any lingering bits of resentment. It was early…
The Latest
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Is ‘Death of Klinghoffer’ Opera Really Anti-Semitic?
(Haaretz) — The contemporary opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” has been fraught with conflict since its premiere, and is poised to be as divisive when it is performed by the Metropolitan Opera here in November, and simultaneously transmitted in high definition to movie theaters around the world. The 1991 opera, by composer John Adams and librettist…
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Diving Back Into Henry Roth’s Streams of Consciousness
Mercy of a Rude Stream By Henry Roth Liveright, 1312 pages, $39.95. Henry Roth was rediscovered twice. In 1964, 30 years after the debut of “Call It Sleep,” an enticing new paperback edition and ecstatic praise from Irving Howe on the front page of The New York Times Book Review catapulted Roth’s neglected masterpiece onto…
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No, Amos Oz, We Shouldn’t Call Settlers Jewish ‘Neo-Nazis’
Amos Oz, probably the most widely acclaimed of all living Israeli authors, has been both criticized and defended for saying several weeks ago that Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria engaged in acts of violence and vandalism toward Arabs were “a monster that needs to be called what it is: Hebrew neo-Nazi groups.” Not all…
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How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Vladimir Jabotinsky
Jabotinsky: A Life By Hillel Halkin Yale University Press, 256 pages, $25 Hillel Halkin’s new biography, “Jabotinsky: A Life,” features as its frontispiece a 1918 photograph of the activist and author in his British military uniform. It’s an excellent choice of illustration that captures several of the paradoxes of his character. The baby-faced infantry officer…
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Cliffs’ Notes on Jabotinsky
Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky was a Zionist activist almost from the get-go. He was born in 1880 in Odessa, Ukraine, a Black Sea city that was home to the 19th-century Jewish intellectual and literary elite of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. He spent his early years as a journalist in Europe and in Russia; he mastered…
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Searching For the Soul of Menachem Begin
Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul By Daniel Gordis Schocken, 320 pages, $27.95. Menachem Begin was one of the more complex personalities in Zionist history. Certainly, he was among the most controversial, and his story has been oft-told. Amos Perlmutter’s 1987 “The Life and Times of Menachem Begin” was conceived as a political biography,…
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Does Translating Yiddish Preserve History Or Betray It?
Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the 20th Century By Anita Norich University of Washington Press, 160 pages, $30 Translators are villains, lechers, traitors. Like the spinster who translates Yankel Ostrover’s stories in Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” they are vain. “Who has read James Joyce, Ostrover or I?” she seethes. “I didn’t…
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Frederic Brenner, the ‘Jewish Christo,’ Uses Photography To Challenge Israel Debate
‘What do you see?” asked the French-born photographer Frédéric Brenner while showing me his new book, “An Archeology of Fear and Desire,” during a recent interview in the Manhattan offices of one of his longtime funders, the Revson Foundation. His photography books, among them 1996’s “Jews/America: A Representation” and 2003’s “Diaspora: Homelands in Exile,” with…
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