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
Q&A With Novelist Yona Zeldis McDonough
“A Wedding in Great Neck:” Family Mishegas Arrives Just in Time for the Nuptials Yona Zeldis McDonough’s new novel “A Wedding in Great Neck” takes place over the course of a single day, as a Jewish family gathers for the lavish wedding (to a handsome Israeli) of Angleica, the aptly-named youngest daughter who at least…
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Books Author Blog: Passing on Stories
Earlier this week, Jami Attenberg wrote about growing up Jewish in a small town. 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: My mother was in town for a few days that summer,…
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Books Paul Goodman Speaks for Half a Generation
Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in an Organized Society By Paul Goodman Foreword by Casey Nelson Blake New York Review Books, Classic Series, 312 pages, $17.95 Reading Paul Goodman’s reissued 1960s classic “Growing Up Absurd” may make you nostalgic for a past you never lived. The author’s uncomplicated idealism evokes an earlier decade of…
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Books Michael Chabon’s Life Is Reflected in ‘Telegraph Avenue’
Even for a particularly verdant block in Berkeley, Calif., Michael Chabon’s home is an oasis amidst the university town clatter and clutter. The brown-shingled house is situated on a flowery patch complete with a wooden fence, a warm front porch and a bouncing Labradoodle named Mabel, who happily charges to the gate to greet visitors….
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Books Mark Helprin’s Politics Doesn’t Get in Way of Prose
In Sunlight And In Shadow By Mark Helprin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 705 pages, $28 Readers indifferent to Mark Helprin’s strident neoconservatism are often won over by Mark Helprin the literary writer — his energetic prose, his intricate plotting, the dreamlike images in novels such as “Refiner’s Fire,” “A Soldier of the Great War” and “Freddy…
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Books Hans Keilson’s First Novel Depicts Life Before Nazis
Life Goes On By Hans Keilson Translated by Damion Searls Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages, $15 Two years ago, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux released translations of his novels “The Death of the Adversary” and “Comedy in a Minor Key,” centenarian Hans Keilson told Steven Erlanger of The New York Times that he would…
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Books Jami Attenberg Phones Home
My new novel, “The Middlesteins,” follows the lives of the titular suburban Chicago Jewish family, whose matriarch is obsessed with food, a thing with which I am also very much interested in myself. Your relationship with food is often informed by a parent’s relationship with it, so I decided to go to one of the…
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Books Q&A: Michael Feinstein on the Gershwins and ‘Porgy’
When Michael Feinstein was in his 20s, he had the good fortune to work as an assistant and archivist for the great Ira Gershwin, who, with his brother George, wrote some of the greatest and most beloved songs in American history. Now a beloved singer in his own right, Feinstein spoke with the Forward about…
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Books Rachel Tzvia Back’s Verse Confronts Devastating Loss
A Messenger Comes By Rachel Tzvia Back Singing Horse Press, 110 Pages, $15 Mourning propels us. We are, none of us, immune. It is the first thing children fear: loss — of a parent, a friend, a sibling, a grandparent — and the first lie we tell them, or half-truth we impart, as parents, promising,…
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Books Némirovsky’s ‘Wine of Solitude’ Confirms Her Place
The Wine of Solitude By Irène Némirovsky Vintage, 256 pages. $15 When we first meet Hélène Karol, she is an 8-year-old girl growing up in Ukraine. She dislikes, and is disliked by, her mother, an exceedingly unhappy member of the morally and financially bankrupt bourgeoisie. Hélène loves and admires her father, who doesn’t care much…
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Books Michael Feinstein Strikes Up The Bland
The Gershwins and Me By Michael Feinstein Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $45 George Gershwin is widely, and rightly, regarded as a quintessentially American character. This isn’t merely because of the way his music sounds; while the music he wrote is unmistakably American, the same can be said for any number of other American composers…
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