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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‘Bageling’ Means Many Things — Not All of Them Fit for Family Paper
This comes from the Forward’s Naomi Zeveloff: “I just did a story it appeared in this newspaper’s October 4 issue on how Chabadniks figure out who is Jewish during their Sukkot street outreach. One of them described ‘bageling’ for me, by which he meant the process by which one Jew on the street subtly recognizes…
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Books Why Philip Roth Is ‘Too Jewish’ for Nobel
When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded, I knew that Philip Roth had not won. A colleague condescended: “I never liked Roth,” a put-down to me, a Miltonist and teacher of Renaissance literature, who really doesn’t know better. A couple of decades ago, someone would have mentioned the more elegant, supposedly more disciplined and…
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Sensation Rocks the Leo Frank Murder Trial
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illuminating and edifying clippings from the Jewish past. 1913 •100 years ago Sensation at the Frank Trial A man who hopes to be a…
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Film Critic Stanley Kauffmann Dies at 97
Stanley Kauffmann, the American Jewish film critic who died on October 9 at age 97 was termed “one of the oldest working critics in history” in obits, but he was more than just a Methuselah among the thumbs-up-or-down crowd. Kauffmann’s long life gave him time to gain useful artistic experience and erudition by trying to…
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Making Room For American Jewish Studies
Last year, Tel Aviv University held what looks to have been a fascinating conference: “Minhagim: Custom and Practice in Jewish Life,” a cross-cultural inquiry into the nature of minhag, or custom, and its relationship to localized patterns of authority and ritual practice. Several days were devoted to exploring the ways in which Romanian Jews decorated…
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Books Fred Bahnson’s 6 Lessons
I don’t often get the opportunity to read books about people I know in real life. Something about the written word is a distant and surreal fantasy world sandwiched between two hard covers. Even if I was reading about real characters, they were never real to me. However, in reading Fred Bahnson’s newest book Soil…
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Books Alice Munro, ‘Canadian Chekhov,’ Wins Nobel for Literature
Canadian Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for her tales of the struggles, loves and tragedies of women in small-town Canada that made her what the award-giving committee called the “master of the contemporary short story”. “Some critics consider her a Canadian Chekhov,” the Swedish Academy said, comparing her to the…
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Books Self-Avowed ‘Jewish-American Princess’ Chronicles Quest To Be African Masai Warrior
Mindy Budgor spent three months in training with Kenya’s Maasai tribe
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Lee Harvey Oswald and the Jews
Before he killed the president of the United States, Lee Harvey Oswald was a metal lathe operator at a radio and television factory in Minsk. He had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959, hoping to take part in a revolution that, unbeknownst to him, had been snuffed out three decades earlier, when Stalin…
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Using Plastic Surgery To Combat Maternal Anxiety
● Textile By Orly Castel-Bloom Translated by Dalya Bilu The Feminist Press, 160 pages, $15.95 In Orly Castel-Bloom’s “Textile,” Amanda Gruber deploys an unusual strategy to help manage her particularly Israeli brand of maternal anxiety about the fate of her combat soldier son: undergoing serial cosmetic surgery. As the novel opens, Amanda is about to…
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Jewish ‘Bond Girl’ Christine Granville Fought the Nazis in Style
The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville By Clare Mulley St. Martin’s Press, 448 pages, $26.99 A new book about the spy Christine Granville, born Krystyna Skarbek of Polish Jewish ancestry, raises the question of whether there could be any joy in espionage after Auschwitz. “The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets…
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