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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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…
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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…
The Latest
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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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Vienna’s Catskills
For the last five years, Austrian artist Yvonne Oswald has been attempting to recreate a world where Alma Mahler, Franz Werfel and Gerhart Hauptmann shared conversations over dinner, while nearby, Arthur Schnitzler wrote in his diary. In this fantastical universe, visitors stood on hotel terraces that looked out toward golf courses and ski jumps, while…
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Food, Sex and Giving to Charity
You’d think that despair and anger about social injustice, deadly diseases and natural calamities would be the primary drivers for donations to charity. But these feelings only represent half of the story. While it is true that we are more likely to give if we are aware of needs (increased media coverage about earthquakes, for…
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How America’s Oldest Jewish Charity Stays on No-Frills Path
If you search for the offices of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, you will not find any. America’s oldest Jewish charitable organization in continuous existence has never had an official headquarters, and most likely never will. That’s not the only thing that distinguishes FHBS from other charities: It has no paid staffers; its members work…
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