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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How Schindler’s List Got It Wrong
● The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe By Olga Gershenson Rutgers University Press, 290 pages, $32.50 As a teenager growing up in Ufa, Russia, I used to play piano in a Jewish music ensemble. Our group was once invited to play a prescreening concert at a local movie theater called Rodina (Motherland), built…
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Books German Literary Critic and Survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Dies at 93
Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany’s best-known literary critic and a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, died on Wednesday aged 93, his publisher said. Reich-Ranicki, a Jew born in Poland in 1920, almost perished at the Nazis’ hands in World War Two but went on to become one of the leading advocates of German literature and culture during…
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Bob Dylan Rescues His Worst Album
The line on Bob Dylan is that he never released his best material. Whether or not that’s entirely true, the best evidence is surely the period from 1967 to 1974 — from the motorcycle accident that ended Dylan’s second, electric incarnation, to the comeback hit “Blood on the Tracks.” During this period, Dylan and The…
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Honoring the Memory of Warren Zevon, Rock’s Raucous ‘Werewolf’ of Fresno
Just about every anecdote from Warren Zevon’s storied rock ’n’ roll career seems steeped in legend. Take the recording of his biggest hit, “Werewolves of London.” Zevon’s longtime collaborator Jorge Calderon recalled finding producer Waddy Wachtel in the back office of the Sound Factory recording studio, “sporting a sad and worried face” because they had…
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The Top 10 Songs of Warren Zevon
From songs of youthful rebellion to late, introspective masterpieces, Warren Zevon’s music continued to evolve until his untimely death. Though he only had one legitimate hit, “Werewolves of London,” the following list also contains many of the most beloved, energetic, and enduring cult classics of his expansive oeuvre. Desperados Under the Eaves represents the moment…
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What If Anne Frank’s Sister Had Survived?
● Margot by Jillian Cantor Penguin, 352 Pages, $16 What if Otto Frank hadn’t been the only survivor of the Prinsengracht annex? What if, instead of dying in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945 — two days before her more famous sister, Anne — Margot Frank had survived the war and resurfaced in Philadelphia, working as a…
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Why Sukkot is called the ‘holiday of the harvest’ — even though there isn’t any harvest
In the Bible, the prayer book and Jewish tradition, the holiday of Sukkot — the “Feast of Booths” or “Feast of Tabernacles,” as it is generally referred to in rather archaic English — also has an accompanying epithet: ḥag ha-asif, the Feast or Holiday of “Gathering” or (as the King James and many other English…
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Getting Schooled in Poetry by Robert Pinsky
● Singing School: Learning To Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying With the Masters By Robert Pinsky W.W. Norton & Company, 240 page, $25.95 In approaching Robert Pinsky’s new book on how to write poetry, unsuspecting students may be eager for trade secrets, but it will shortly dawn on them that Pinsky has a different…
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‘Shtisel’ Fills a Void in Israeli Television
The creators of the new hit Israeli Hebrew-language TV drama series “Shtisel,” which debuted earlier this summer on the YES cable channel, are pleased by the series’s popularity; however, they say they are not surprised by it. The unique appeal of “Shtisel” is as much about what it is not as it is about what…
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Books Malamud’s ‘Refugee’ at 50
A version of this post originally appeared on Ron Hogan’s Beatrice blog. I owe my discovery of Bernard Malamud’s “The German Refugee” — published 50 years ago Saturday — to “The Best American Short Stories of the Century,” which joined my bookshelf shortly after its release. And although I don’t normally use the word “frisson”…
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Jewish Foundation for Culture To Shutter Next Year
Does Jewish culture need a central address in order to thrive? Not according to the people who work there. The Foundation for Jewish Culture, a New York-based organization that has given more than $50 million to Jewish scholars and artists since 1960, will cease its operations in the coming year. According to the FJC’s president…
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