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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Remembering Composer Vivian Fine on Her Centenary
September 28 marks the centenary of Vivian Fine (1913-2000) a Chicago-born composer who was profoundly influenced by Yiddishkeit. As Fine, who died in 2000 at the age of 87, told the composer Elizabeth Vercoe in a 1992 interview, her mother came from a “Russian Jewish family and started to work herself when she was 14….
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Gary Graffman’s Journey From Jewish Piano Virtuoso to Civil Rights Pioneer
Recent commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement’s landmark March on Washington might not appear to have much in common with the legacy of American Jewish pianist Gary Graffman, who celebrates his 85th birthday on October 14. But history entwined the two in 1964, when one of this country’s most revered musicians…
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Journeying Back to the Land of Amos Oz
Between Friends By Amos Oz Translator Sondra Silverston Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 192 pages, $24 As historian Derek Penslar has remarked, the kibbutz is “one of the hallmarks of the Zionist project, and although it appears to have reached its end as a generative and innovative force within Israeli society, the kibbutz’s historical grandeur and significance…
The Latest
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The Exile and Resurrection of Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall. The name alone conjures a world — a simple, superstitious village, smelling strongly of hay and manure. The single story houses all have thatched roofs. The people are poor, uneducated, but their lives are filled with magic. Angels and ghosts wander among them. Sometimes devils, too. And that fiddler you hear on the…
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Books Ryan Braun Yanked from ‘Jewish Sports Stars’ Cover
If you’re Jewish, and a sports star, you probably have an assured spot in David J. Goldman’s “Jewish Sports Stars: Past and Present.” But if you’re found to be violating Major League Baseball’s enhancing drug policy, you might not make the cover. So it goes for Ryan Braun, the disgraced slugger who was suspended for…
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Navigating Battlefield of Orthodox Marriage and Divorce
Marriage and Divorce in the Jewish State: Israel’s Civil War By Susan M. Weiss and Netty C. Gross-Horowitz Brandeis University Press, 240 pages, $40 Until modern times, an agunah, a “chained” or “anchored” woman, was usually a wife whose husband had been lost at sea or killed on the battlefield; rabbis wrote circles around the…
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The Not-So-Dirty ‘Dirty Dancing’ Story
In the mid-1980s, Eleanor Bergstein returned to Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills, where she had vacationed as a child during its heyday, to research her screenplay for “Dirty Dancing.” One night, she got a call from Hollywood. “While I was on the phone,” she told the Forward, “the operator broke in and said: ‘You better…
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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…
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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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