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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Letting Go of Roth
One never knows why another human really does what he does. And as readers, we can’t ever really know why an author makes the decisions he does on the page. Authorial intent is somewhat sacred. All we can do as readers is speculate on the work as it sits, or sings, on the page. But…
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The Humbling of Philip Roth
As word came over the transom last week (an actual transom, since I don’t have a working computer) that Philip Roth was retiring, I dismissed it as old, dull news. I’d read the report in the original French, and translated it myself into Turkish and then into Swiss-German just for fun. Then, along with the…
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When He Was Good
There’s no consensus about when writers should put down their pens. Some, like J.D. Salinger or E.M. Forster, stop very early. Others, like Philip Roth until his recent announcement, keep publishing brilliant work well into their later years. There’s no conventional wisdom here, no right answer. Yet when such a decision is reached, IT’s time…
The Latest
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Books Author Blog: What Makes a Creative Process Jewish?
Earlier this week, David Ebenbach wrote about what makes a short story Jewish. 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: Is my fiction Jewish? In my last blog post I came to…
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From Gaza to Guantanamo
The Culture Project’s artistic director Allan Buchman (pronounced Bush-man) draws a distinction between political theater and issue-based theater. “All theater is political as it reflects experiences one has in life, real or imaginary,” he said. “We’re drawn to issue-based theater. We want to advance the issues that are not addressed by corporate media.” Buchman looked…
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Looking Back: November 30th 2012
100 Years Ago 1912 Morris Lustig, who in 1910 poisoned his wife in order to collect $3,000 in insurance money, has been freed from Sing Sing prison’s death row. Lustig was freed after it was determined that his attorney wasn’t given enough time to cross-examine a key witness, a drug store owner who testified that…
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Books Author Blog: What Makes a Short Story Jewish?
David Ebenbach’s collection “Into the Wilderness” is now available. 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: I think most Jewish writers, at one time or another, face the question of what makes…
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Herman Wouk’s ‘The Lawgiver’ Marks Return to Form
What kind of author writes himself into his own novel? One with a great deal of hubris, it would seem. But if that writer is a 97-year-old Pulitzer Prize writer, with over 60 years of best-selling books behind him, we might judge him more sympathetically. His story, after all, amounts to literary history. And in…
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The People of the Books
This column seems recently to have aroused in many of you questions about Yiddish words or phrases that you remember hearing long ago from parents or grandparents. The latest such query comes from Marcia Bender of Forest Hills, Queens. She asks: “When my grandmother was very old, I used to help her light the Sabbath…
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Uncertain Future for Jews in French Provinces
An Uncertain Future: Voices of a French Jewish Community, 1940-2012 By Robert I. Weiner and Richard E. Sharpless University of Toronto Press, 344 pages, $29.95 Much rarer than Dijon’s mustard and wine is the small and, until recently, vibrant Jewish community that called this small French city home. But as its title warns, “An Uncertain…
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On the Verge of a Nation’s Breakdown
A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution By Samar Yazbek Translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss Haus Publishing, 256 pages, $18.95 Syrian journalist and novelist Samar Yazbek was born into privilege 42 years ago, a member of a well-connected, wealthy Alawite family and related by marriage to Osama bin Laden on…
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