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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Woman Held Captive in Saloon Rescued by Jewish Man
1913 •100 years ago Captive in a Saloon “I beg of you, please have pity on me and save me. I am being held captive. I am scared they will kill me. I am next to a saloon. Sarah.” So read a note written in Yiddish, found on an Osborn Street sidewalk in the Brownsville…
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Books Gary Shteyngart’s Star-Studded New Book Trailer
The nebbishy Russian-Jewish character author Gary Shteyngart has cultivated both in his books and in his public persona is back yet again in the humorous book trailer for his upcoming memoir, “Little Failure.” A bunch of Shteyngart’s friends, including James Franco, Rashida Jones and Sloane Crosley, play along with him in the video. The premise…
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NYU Acquires Archive of Legendary Downtown Arts Pioneer
The archive of the late Tuli Kupferberg, a seminal figure in New York’s counterculture scene of the 1960s who died in 2010 at the age of 86, has been acquired by New York University’s Fales Library. Kupferberg’s work, which included poems, songs and cartoons, drew on Jewish sources, from the Yiddish folk melodies appropriated by…
The Latest
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The Jewish History of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Private Secretary
Ten years after his death, a French Jewish author hitherto celebrated chiefly for making philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre more sympathetic to Jews, is now earning attention for his own works. Benny Lévy, who died in 2003 at the age of 58, is being honored with the posthumous publication of his works, along with homages from students…
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The Most Graphic War Story Ever Told
● The Great War July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme By Joe Sacco W.W. Norton & Company, one 24-foot-long accordion-style page and a 16 page supplementary booklet, $35 Anyone with an interest in the state of Israel, its contradictions and compromises, and the sad history of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian…
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Books Poems of Heresy and Transformation
If poetry requires disclosure, I’ll start with one: I am a friend of Yermiyahu Ahron Taub’s, and a fellow Yiddish poet. He sent me his book with a kind dedication, and an additional inscription in his neat hand: bet-samekh-daled. That is, the author of this book entitled “Prayers of a Heretic” noted that his signature…
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Books Randi Zuckerberg’s ‘Dot Complicated’
It’s been a good (or perhaps bad) year for normal-woman outrage. I’m still pretty irked about being told to “Lean In,” and now there is yet another book by an uber-successful (and uber-lucky) woman who thinks her life lessons apply to the rest of us. If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about former Facebook marketing…
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The Joy of Jewish Cookbooks
“I didn’t want this exhibit to be only of interest to Jews or foodies, but to everyone,” said Janice Bluestein Longone, collector of one of the most important archives of culinary literature in America. In the 1990s she was made adjunct curator of the collection after donating the archive to the University of Michigan in…
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Who’s To Blame For the State of Today’s NFL? Try Sid Luckman
The course of the current NFL season demonstrates the great flaw of professional football: The quarterback has become too important. Teams like Green Bay Packers or Chicago Bears lose a single player — Aaron Rodgers and Jay Cutler respectively — and the entire season washes out. To understand how this crazy state of affairs came…
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Your Days Are Numbered… and So Is Just About Everything Else
Emily Koenders writes that she is working on a paper on gematria in rabbinic literature and wonders if I can help her locate the talmudic sources of three examples of it. Gematria (pronounced with a hard “g”) is the rabbinic term for finding significance in the numerical value of the letters of Hebrew words. In…
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From Orthodox Teen Lesbians To the Holocaust, An Author Courts Controversy
If I were making a list of topics I am not looking forward to discussing with my young daughters, the top three might be (and I am not sure in what order) sexual desire, the Holocaust and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. So I don’t know whether to be grateful for Leanne Lieberman’s books or…
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