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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Photographer Clemens Kalischer Survived Holocaust But Struggles To Adapt
In 1939 Clemens Kalischer was an 18-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who was subsisting in Paris, when he somehow scraped together enough francs to purchase a small but potent book — “Paris Vu Par” — containing vital images of the city by the ingenious Hungarian Jewish photographer André Kertész. Kalischer had the volume with…
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Books Jewish Novels of Jewish Hollywood
American Dream Machine By Matthew Specktor Tin House Books, 464 pages, $25.95 Some people will always believe that the Jews run Hollywood. But even if Spielberg, Katzenberg, Weinstein, Bruckheimer, Zucker and the rest of their pals could comfortably form a minyan, the number of Americans who believe that Jews control the film industry has dropped…
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The Tsarnaev Brothers Are Many Things. But Cowards? Not So Much.
“A heinous and cowardly act,” President Obama called the Boston Marathon bombing soon after its occurrence. Heinous, it certainly was. But why cowardly? To do what the two Tsarnaev brothers did —construct and transport homemade bombs that could have gone off in their hands at any moment, fling them out the windows of a speeding…
The Latest
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Diary of Girl’s Time in Concentration Camps Invites Comparisons to Anne Frank
● Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp By Helga Weiss, translated by Neil Bermel W.W. Norton, 240 pages, $24.95 Seven decades after the Holocaust, survivor stories are still trickling out, adding nuance to a familiar and gruesome narrative. It is sometimes hard for these latecomers to get the attention…
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American Nazis Arrested
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75 and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illuminating and edifying clippings from the Jewish past. 100 years ago 1913 Samuel Cohen, 73, and 67-year-old Constantine Donohue both came to the United…
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Books Author Blog: Statues and Golems
Earlier this week, Helene Wecker shared a golem-centric reading list and wrote about writing a novel in two cultures and Dorkdom. Enter to win a copy of her debut novel, “The Golem and the Jinni,” here. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
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Robert Alter Is Truly a Translator of Biblical Proportions
Literary scholar Robert Alter has spent the past three decades shedding new light on one of Western civilization’s oldest and best-known texts. In his 1981 work “The Art of Biblical Narrative” and subsequent writings, Alter has argued that the Hebrew bible is threaded through with a previously unrecognized set of sophisticated literary techniques that unify…
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Books Under the Influence of Golems
Earlier this week, Helene Wecker wrote about writing a novel in two cultures and dorkdom. Enter to win a copy of her debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, here. 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…
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Author Jennifer Gilmore’s New Novel Confronts the Mother of All Struggles
● The Mothers By Jennifer Gilmore Scribner, 288 pages, $26 In her novel “The Mothers,” Jennifer Gilmore has written the book all women of a certain age going through the infertility cycles of hell long to hand to any member of the fertile world who asks that innocent but searing question: So, are you pregnant…
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Books Gary Shteyngart Wrote a Memoir
The next work from Gary Shteyngart, the novelist known for books such as “Absurdistan” and “Super Sad True Love Story,” will be a memoir, The New York Times reports. The book will be titled “Little Failure” and will be released in January 2014 by Random House. According to Shteyngart’s editor, David Ebershoff, the book will…
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Books Writing a Novel in Two Cultures
Earlier this week, Helene Wecker wrote about dorkdom and writing while Jewish. Enter to win a copy of her debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, here. 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,…
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