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
She Was a Novelist, Chicago-Born
‘Yudl’: And Selected Short Stories By Layle Silbert Seven Stories Press, 240 pages, $17.95 Layle Silbert’s “Yudl” opens with the protagonist, an immigrant Jew with a thick accent and heavy socialist leanings, inspecting a building that appears incomplete. “With its empty unglassed windows,” the three-story-high, red brick building “could be a new building not yet…
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In Ramsgate, Searching For the Legacy of Sir Moses Montefiore
Walking around the depressed Ramsgate of today, it is somewhat difficult to imagine that when the financier Sir Moses Montefiore purchased a country estate here in 1831, this seaside settlement was considered the height of sophistication and chic. Located on a far easterly point of the Kentish coast of England, bereft of the holidaymakers that…
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Backward Exclusive: Zuckerberg on Bloomberg’s ‘Nobel’ Prize
Mark Zuckerberg is livid. “I can’t believe they gave the Genesis Prize to that tiny tiny man,” the founder, CEO and control-freak-in-chief of YouFace spluttered while sipping a latte from a Starbucks in San Francisco, a small town he owns in Northern California. “I mean, it’s not like he, needs the money. Those of us…
The Latest
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The Secret Jewish History of Steve Jobs And Apple
Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs – who is currently being portrayed by Ashton Kutcher in the biopic “Jobs” — was the biological child of a Syrian-born father and a Swiss-American Catholic mother who gave him up for adoption at birth. He was raised in northern California by a working-class couple — Paul Reinhold Jobs and his…
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The Fine Jewish Art of Burlesque
Sometimes they hold hands; other times they dance by themselves. But make no mistake: The Schlep Sisters— Minnie Tonka and Darlinda Just Darlinda — are emotionally committed to each other as they peel off their clothes in a burlesque parody of sibling love gone demented. To the tune of The Barry Sisters warbling in Yiddish,…
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Books Will We Ever Be Forgiven for the Holocaust?
The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never. The shocking psychological truth is that man rejects the burden of guilt by turning the tables on those we have wronged and portraying ourselves as the victims of their suffering. The Roman historian Tacitus spells it out. “It is part of human life,”…
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Books How I Learned Not To Be J.D. Salinger
Back in high school, I was friends with the Salinger boys, but I wasn’t really one of them. As I recall it now, there were three: John, Thom and Barnaby (I’ve changed two of their names and I’ve left one the same, for reasons you’ll probably figure out later). You could recognize the Salinger boys…
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Books The Misadventures of a Secular English Teacher in an Orthodox School
The son of Polish Holocaust survivors, Larry N. Mayer grew up in the Bronx, NY. His first book, “Who Will Say Kaddish?: A Search for Jewish Identity in Contemporary Poland” was published by Syracuse University Press in 2002. He has worked with at-risk high school students for over fifteen years, and wrote about his experiences…
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How Famed French Artists Came To Identify Themselves With a Hebrew Name
A major art exhibition that opened in September at the Hermitage Amsterdam museum features works by three post-Impressionist French painters: Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis — the first two better known to the general public than the third. They were, according to the museum’s press release, “briefly united with a few other artists……
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Books Unread Family Letters Open Window Onto Life on the Eve of the Holocaust
On my first trip to Israel, just hours after I landed in Tel Aviv, my Israeli cousin Benny told me that he had nearly 300 family letters dating back to the 1930s and ’40s. I had come to Israel to research a book about the family that Benny and I have in common, and this…
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Books Meet the Pope’s Jewish Bookbinder
Those of you who have strayed through antiquarian bookshops will have, on occasion, chanced upon particularly unique-looking books. Perhaps a volume bound and covered in leather or vellum, as likely or not adorned with ornate designs or engravings. Maybe the cover has been embossed with an ancient typeface? These books might have special features such…
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