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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Galleries Offer a Jew’s Who of the Contemporary Art World
On the wood-framed doorway of the gallery Untitled, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, hangs a mezuza. It’s small, unassuming, something you wouldn’t necessarily notice if not for the title of the exhibition inside: “Jew York.” But it turns out that the mezuza wasn’t installed for the show; it’s been there for years, since…
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Books Rachel Kushner’s ‘The Flamethrowers’ Arrives With a Bang
● The Flamethrowers By Rachel Kushner Scribner, 400 pgs, $26.99 In many ways, “The Flamethrowers,” Rachel Kushner’s novel about the historical, political, cultural and — most daringly — ideological chaos of the 1970s, is a simple bildungsroman. It tracks the sentimental education of its heroine, Reno, from starry-eyed, eager youth, lusting after experience — her…
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Books Author Blog: Visiting the Soviet Union
Yesterday, Peri Devaney wrote about working on the postscript for her anthology, “A Jewish Professor’s Political Punditry: Fifty-Plus Years of Published Commentary by Ron Rubin” (Syracuse University Press). Today we hear from Ron Rubin, the prolific professor she anthologized. Their blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and…
The Latest
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Books Jewish Novel Included on Man Booker Longlist
Life in London’s Jewish community and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, billionaires in China and hard times in Ireland all feature in the novels vying for this year’s Man Booker Prize. The longlist for the prize, one of the English language’s top fiction awards, names 13 writers from seven countries. “This is surely the most diverse longlist…
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Books How To Be an Egotistical Writer From South Africa
Things I Don’t Want to Know: A Response to George Orwell’s Why I Write By Deborah Levy Notting Hill Editions In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” George Orwell identified four great motives for writing, including aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. The other, he observed, was that writers are “vain and self-centred,” motivated…
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In Praise of Saul Leiter, Color Photography Pioneer
It was a good year for [Saul Leiter][1], who died Tuesday at the age 89. There’s a new documentary about his life and work, an exhibition of his photographs and paintings in London and earlier this year, he was presented with a lifetime achievement award at the ArtHamptons International Fine Art Fair. Over the course…
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The Top 10 Allan Sherman Lyrics
10 – “King Louie was living like a king” (“You Went The Wrong Way Old King Louie”) 9 – “Al ‘n Yetta watched an operetta/Leonard Bernstein told them what they saw” (“Al ‘n Yetta”) 8 – “Come let us go there/Live like Thoreau there” (“Here’s to the Crabgrass”) 7 – “And you won’t have a…
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Books Author Blog: Putting Myself on the Line
Peri Devaney’s new book, “A Jewish Professor’s Political Punditry: Fifty-Plus Years of Published Commentary by Ron Rubin” (Syracuse University Press), is now available. 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: As a…
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Allan Sherman Was Once Bigger Than the Beatles
● Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman By Mark Cohen Brandeis University Press, 320 pages, $29.95 I loved visiting my maternal grandparents in the Elmhurst section of Queens. Although they lived in a modest, two-bedroom apartment on a side street tucked between Broadway and Roosevelt avenues, the place seemed exotic, as I…
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Books Naftali Herts Kon’s Works Wrenched Out of Poland’s Clutches
On both occasions that the KGB arrested the Yiddish writer and poet Naftali Herts Kon, it burned his writings. When Kon escaped from the Soviet Union to Poland in 1959, he thought everything would be different — but it wasn’t. When the Polish Communists arrested Kon in 1960, they simply confiscated his writings and refused…
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A Coup Is a Coup — Even If We Like Outcome
When is a military coup not a military coup? Whenever, so it would seem, an administration in Washington wants to say it’s something else. Although, as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank observes, “call[ing] the overthrow [of the Egyptian government] a ham sandwich won’t make it any less of a coup,” Washington has preferred to refer…
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