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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Franz Kafka’s Birthday Offers Kafkaesque Dilemma
● Kafka: The Years of Insight By Reiner Stach Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Princeton University Press, $35, 720 pages In September 1913, Franz Kafka, employee of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of Prague and recently the author of two flawless, utterly disturbing stories — “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis” — took a…
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Buddha Meets the Kabbalah in San Francisco
Barnett Newman’s steel sculpture “Zim Zum 1” typically resides on the roof of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It now sits across the street, on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where it is the first piece to confront viewers of the exhibit “Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in…
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Books Lynda Obst vs. Hollywood
Lynda Obst is a Hollywood insider but not a fan of what she sees happening in Tinseltown. A former editor of The New York Times Magazine, she became a successful producer, with such films as “The Fisher King” and “Sleepless in Seattle” to her credit. But at some point, Obst realized that she wasn’t in…
The Latest
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Books On Franz Kafka’s Birthday, Looking Through Lens of his Sexuality
● Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt By Saul Friedländer Yale University Press, 224 pages, $25 If ever there was an author whose works resisted analysis, it’s Franz Kafka. What does it mean, after all, that Gregor Samsa wakes up in “The Metamorphosis” and finds himself turned into a bug? In “Franz Kafka:…
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What Kickstarter Is Good For
CYCO, the world’s oldest Yiddish bookstore, founded 75 years ago, is located on the seventh floor of a former industrial building in the Queens neighborhood Long Island City, not far from MoMA PS1 and next-door to a sustainable architecture firm. The bookstore occupies a large, well-lit room with a wall of windows overlooking Manhattan, and…
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From Dancing Barres to Prison Bars, Avodah Makes Its Mark
Four days before the debut of their newest work, entitled “moving voices inside out,” the four women of Avodah Dance were holding a bumpy run-through in a fourth-floor playroom in Manhattan’s 14th Street Y. Dancer Sarah Zitnay, her black socks more holes than fabric, seared the edges of adhesive tape with a lighter and then…
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Why Judas Still Conjures Up Images of the Jew as Christ-Killer
‘I never informed or ratted on nobody,” John “The Executioner” Martorano said while testifying at the trial of crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger in a Boston court June 18. Martorano, a professional hit man with a confessed 20 murders under his belt, had agreed to take the witness stand against Bulger and his partner, Stevie…
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Lower East Side Physician Arrested for Dealing Cocaine and Opium
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, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 years ago 1913 Abraham Glickstein, a well-known physician who resides on Manhattan’s Lower…
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Jewish Artist Who Once Called Chagall’s Art ‘Crappy’ Finally Gets His Due
The French Jewish painter Sam Szafran is the subject of an exhibit, “Sam Szafran, 50 Years of Painting,” at the Pierre Gianadda Foundation in Martigny, Switzerland, and a new book, [“Sam Szafran: Entretiens avec Alain Veinstein” (“Sam Szafran, Conversations With Alain Veinstein”)][3], that sheds further light on the artist’s inspirations. Born Samuel Berger in Paris…
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Abrom Kaplan’s Cajun Dream
Driving west on I-10 out of New Orleans, you plunge almost immediately into a world made more of water than of land. First you cross the Bonnet Carre Spillway, which channels overflowing river water into Lake Pontchartrain. Later, in Baton Rouge, you rattle 175 feet above the Mississippi on a rickety cantilever bridge. And then,…
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Books The Kosher Ice Cream Caper
Earlier this week Timothy D. Lytton wrote about a recent scandal at a kosher meat market in L.A. and organized crime and kosher food certification. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:…
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