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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Rediscovering Beauty Amid Ruins of Once-Glorious Catskills
Photographer Marisa Scheinfeld pointed to a pile of rubble at what’s left of the famous Catskills resort hotel the Concord — once a glamorous beast of luxury with 1,200 rooms, three golf courses and a 3,000-seat dining room. “Over here was the outdoor pool, which was a tremendous, Olympic-sized swimming pool that I worked at…
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Is The Fruit of Leviticus Really an Etrog?
Besides the sukkah itself, nothing is more associated with the holiday of Sukkot than the “four species” — the arba’a minim, as they are called in Hebrew. These are the etrog or citron fruit; the lulav or palm shoot, and the willow and myrtle branches in which the base of the palm shoot is set…
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Brewing Up Memories From Pushcart Days of Jewish Old Milwaukee
Approaching Milwaukee’s Helfaer Community Service Building, which Edward Durell Stone designed in 1973, it’s easy to be fooled by the windows. At first glance, the landscape-oriented building, nestled a block off Lake Michigan, resembles an enormous 10-by-3 wine box partition, with negative space peeking through the dividers. But however deceptive the highly reflective windows may…
The Latest
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Pope of Literature, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Dies at 93
A memoir, “The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki published by Princeton University Press in 2001, recounts the unlikely story of how a Polish Jewish escapee from the Warsaw Ghetto managed to become the so-called “Pope of Literature” (Der Literatur-Papst) in postwar Germany. The critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who died yesterday at the age…
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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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