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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Books
Author Blog: A Word on Who I Am
Earlier this week, Ilan Mochari wrote about the autobiographical elements in his novel, “Zinsky the Obscure” (Fomite Press). 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: A few months ago I finished Pete…
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Meet the New Generation of Jewish Magicians
Video footage recorded live at the Players Theatre. While Jews make up less than 3% of the American population, nearly 20% of American magicians are Jews. There’s David Copperfield, Ricky Jay and David Blaine, the endurance artist who sports several controversial tattoos, including the numbers that were branded on Primo Levi’s arm at Auschwitz. “Magic…
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Klezmer Musician’s Death Plunges Author Into Exploration of Madness and Grief
● The Guardians: An Elegy By Sarah Manguso Picador, 104 pages, $20. American Jewish author Sarah Manguso’s “The Guardians: An Elegy” is a strip map of a memoir about Manguso’s grief at the suicide of a close friend, a klezmer musician who suffered from recurring psychosis. Lean, elliptical and beautifully written, her book, recently released…
The Latest
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Books HarperCollins Nixes ‘Wild Things’ Sequel
Those hoping there would be a sequel to Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” are in for a disappointment. A Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a poem called “Back to the Wild” has been suspended following a copyright complaint from HarperCollins, which published the original “Wild Things.” The U.K.-based crowdfunding…
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How Dogs Went From Feared Enemy to Jew’s Best Friend
‘If you are already a dog, at least do not be a pig.” “A cantor in his old age barks like a dog and eats like a pig.” “A wife is like a dog in the house.” These and other Yiddish proverbs may be seen as objectionable today, but all reflect the complex and contradictory…
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The Top 10 Jewish Dogs of All Time
The relationship between dogs and Jews has been a fraught and complicated one. Though dogs fared poorly in the Hebrew Bible, of late, they have been honored as family pets and even granted “bark mitzvahs.” In order to better understand the history of the People of Canaan and their changing attitudes towards the Beasts of…
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Books Not All Autobiographical Elements Are Equal
Ilan Mochari’s novel, “Zinsky the Obscure” (Fomite Press), is now available. He is Chief Writer for The Build Network and a contributor to Cognoscenti, the online magazine for Boston’s NPR News Station. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For…
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Books Author Blog: My Biggest Love
Earlier, David Ehrlich wrote about the shared culture, language, and fate of Israelis. 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: My third book was published this week. Needless to say, I’m somewhere…
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Books Author Blog: Only in Israel
David Ehrlich has published two books of short stories in Hebrew, “18 Blue” and “Tuesday and Thursday Mornings.” His newest book, “Who Will Die Last: Stories of Life in Israel,” is now available. His bookstore-cafe in Jerusalem, Tmol-Shilshom, is a haven for avant garde artists and writers, hosting readings by authors such as David Grossman,…
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When the Second Verse Is Same as the First in Hebrew
From Ben Zion Katz of Chicago comes this email: “The noted Italian rabbi Leon de Modena (1571-1648) accomplished a linguistic tour de force by writing an octet, entitled Kina Sh’mor, that made sense whether read as Hebrew or Italian. My brother Jeffrey and I have written a poem that does the same with Hebrew and…
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Moyshe the Shtarker, Jewish Gangster, Stabbed and Shot
100 years ago Gangster Stabbed and Shot Morris Reich, better known on the Lower East Side as Moyshe the Shtarker, was standing in front of a pool hall and smoking a cigar on Avenue B near Eighth Street last Thursday afternoon when three young men walked up to him, seemingly in order to engage him…
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