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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Poor Heiress Pens Unorthodox Orthodox Memoir
Rokeby is an estate along the Hudson River that was built nearly 200 years ago by relatives of John Jacob Astor, America’s first multimillionaire. About two dozen people currently live in various buildings spread out along the 400-plus acres of rolling hills. But the 43-room stucco mansion at Rokeby) is occupied by a handful of…
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David Nirenberg Traces The Long, Bewildering History of Anti-Semitism
● Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition By David Nirenberg W.W. Norton & Company, 624 pages, $35 Anti-Semitism’s eternal recurrence is so puzzling that it can invite mystification. Even the secularist Yiddish poet Yitzchak Katznelson, grappling with the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, resorted to religious myth. In his “Song of the Murdered Jewish People” (completed shortly…
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What Makes a Jewish Joke Jewish?
● No Joke: Making Jewish Humor By Ruth R. Wisse Princeton University Press, 292 pages, $24.95 As a well-known Yiddish expression has put it, “A joke is a half-truth.” Ruth Wisse presents readers of her latest work, “No Joke: Making Jewish Humor,” with half-a-book. The effective half offers a general audience analysis of literature and…
The Latest
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Books Charles Bernstein Makes Lovely Cacophony in his Latest Collection
● Recalculating By Charles Bernstein University of Chicago Press, 189 pages, $25 As an old joke goes, there are three types of people in the world: schlemiel, the guy who will spill the soup; schlimazel, the one whose lap the soup will get spilt on, and the nudnik, who asks, “What kind of a soup…
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True History of an Unknown Hero of the French Jewish Resistance
Shortly after she agreed to speak to me for an interview, Charlotte Sorkine Noshpitz tells me that she has had a dream. Members of her Resistance group are seated on the floor, the way children in a group sometimes arrange themselves. She is standing — behind them, looking down at their heads. She is shocked…
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Books My Family’s Reaction to ‘Fame Shark’
Royal Young’s debut memoir “Fame Shark” will be released June 2013 from Heliotrope Books. Young contributes to Interview Magazine, New York Post, BOMB Magazine and The Lo Down. 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…
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Everybody Knows The Cliche Of The Jewish Mother — But What About Jewish Dads?
Happy Jewish Father’s Day — and you know what that means, right? Well, actually, you probably don’t. Because unlike Jewish mothers, who’ve got a stereotype that just won’t die (not even if it goes outside without a sweater), Jewish fathers are not defined as any one thing. Which got me wondering: Why not? Why are…
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It’s a Hebrew Thing — You Get It or You Don’t
In last week’s column, I argued, in discussing the Hebrew word sefirah, that the kabbalistic doctrine of the 10 sefirot or emanations of the divinity was not a result of Christian influence. This week, going from the cosmic to the strictly linguistic, I’ve been led to the conclusion that a well-known rabbinical expression definitely was…
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Haman of Ellis Island Resigns
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. 100 years ago 1913 Finally, the Haman of Ellis Island has met his end. Now that…
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Books Thinking in Aramaic, Writing in English
Earlier this week, Janice Weizman wrote about writing historical fiction and the bildungsroman and the Jewish woman. Her 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: “Many artists are ‘underground’,” a writing instructor of…
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The Enduring Jewish Traditions of Philanthropy and Collecting
Most people, if asked to define what the modernization of the Jews entailed, would no doubt refer to the ways in which they took to urban life, made much of higher education, prospered economically, and exchanged Yiddish and Ladino for English (or French or German). They’d be right to think so. But if I had…
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