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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Iowa’s Fields of Midwestern Jewish Dreams
Synagogues in rural Iowa are few and far between for good reason. Out of almost three million residents in the 26th largest state, there are no more than 6,000 Jews, and almost half of them them live in the capital, Des Moines. So few Jews live — and die —in Iowa that the Jewish Funeral…
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Jewish Enviro-Artists Have the Whole World in Their Hands
Mierle Laderman Ukeles seemed overwhelmed. She had just returned from a month-long stay in Israel at the height of the horrors, and was now playing catch-up as the official, but unsalaried, artist-in-residence at the New York City Sanitation Department, a gig she has held since 1977. As a longtime champion of the department, Ukeles has…
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When Anya Ulinich Plays the Dating Game
● Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel By Anya Ulinich Penguin Books, 362 pages, $18 If the title of Anya Ulinich’s graphic novel, “Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel,” sounds familiar, you are probably thinking of Bernard Malamud’s story “The Magic Barrel,” which concerns one Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student who, on the verge of ordination, must find a…
The Latest
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Is Garment Industry a Relic of Yesteryear?
A lament: I can’t find a thing to wear. On second thought, let me amend that so that it reads more truthfully and accurately: I can’t find anything to buy — and it is not for want of trying, I assure you. My bellyaching has cause. As summer takes its leave, I eagerly peruse the…
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3 Jewish Writers Nominated for National Book Awards
The National Book Award long list of nominees for 2014 were announced Wednesday, and three books by Jewish writers were nominated. In the nonfiction category, the graphic memoir “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant” by Roz Chast, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and “The Innovators: How A Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks…
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What Berlin Would Have Looked Like If Hitler Won
Adolf Hitler’s utopian plans to rebuild Berlin on a monumental scale were never realized, but the preparations that got under way involved demolitions and the use of slave labor – the victims mainly Jewish, as a new exhibition shows. Masterminded by the Nazis’ favorite architect, Albert Speer, Hitler’s grand vision of a new capital for…
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Books A Page-Turner That Tackles Hot-Button Issues
All I Love and Know By Judith Frank William Morrow, 432 pages, $26.99 You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy “All I Love and Know,” Judith Frank’s terrific new novel. Nor do you have to be gay. Although the book addresses issues important to both Jews and gays — Jewish identity, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,…
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Books Reason and Religion Converge in ‘The Mathematician’s Shiva’
The Mathematician’s Shiva By Stuart Rojstaczer Penguin Books, 384 pages, $16.00 Sasha Karnokovitch, narrator of the novel “The Mathematician’s Shiva,” isn’t the warmest of storytellers. Born in Russia at the height of the Cold War to two brilliant mathematicians, Sasha has eschewed the cold Wisconsin town where he came of age in favor of a…
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Picturing the Lives of Scottish Jews
Photographs reek of death. At best they fossilize objects as they were, at worst they condemn them to an eternity out of context. If he’d lived to see them, Keats would be proud of these foster-children of “Silence and slow Time.” It’s difficult to imagine a genre less suitable for portraying Scottish Jews: a group…
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What Does God Really Look Like?
As children, we all have different images of what God might look like. Artist Liana Finck asked a wide variety of people about their childhood images of God. The results are, umm, surprising. SCROLL DOWN FOR LARGER IMAGE.
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The Secret Yiddish History of Scotland
Recently, as Scotland’s independence vote began to loom large in the media, someone asked me if I had ever heard of Scots Yiddish. “I canna say that I have,” I answered, only to be told that there was an entire chapter on the subject in David Daiches’s autobiographical “Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood.” Scots…
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