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
Author Blog: Jewish People and Books
Earlier this week, Yehuda Kurtzer wrote about a recent Commentary article by Jack Wertheimer and the transmission of memory. 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: Do the Jewish People need more…
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Unlikely Chronicler of Jewish Neighborhood
The president of the New York Tattoo Society is an unlikely figure to launch what may be the most ambitious publishing venture ever to cover the Jewish Lower East Side. Clayton Patterson, a non-Jew whose long beard could be mistaken for that of a biblical patriarch, is the editor of the three-volume “Jews: A People’s…
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Books Keret and Englander Nominated for Award
Israeli writer Etgar Keret and American author Nathan Englander have both been shortlisted for the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the biggest prize in the world for a short story collection. Keret was nominated for “Suddenly a Knock on the Door,” and Englander received a nod for “What We Talk About When We…
The Latest
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Broadway Empire
Mr. Broadway: The Inside Story of the Shuberts, the Shows, and the Stars By Gerald Schoenfeld Applause, 304 pages, 27.99 In August 2008, my family — parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister — made a pilgrimage to New York City to speak with Gerald Schoenfeld, then chairman of the Shubert Organization, the largest theater group on…
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Looking Back: June 15, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward After Big Jack Zelig, a gangster from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, survived a recent shooting in a gang war between the Jewish gang headed by “Kid Twist” and the Italian gang led by Jack Sirocco, he took the stand to testify against his assailants. In the wake of the…
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Books Fan and Critic Both
Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958–2008 By John Leonard Viking Press, 401 pages, $35 In beginning to compose a review of “Reading for My Life,” the latest and possibly final collection of John Leonard’s essays and criticism, one must confront the obvious absurdity of writing a book review of a collection of book reviews. Though…
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Books Secrets of the Cellar
Hunting Down the Jews: Vichy, the Nazis and Mafia Collaborators in Provence 1942–1944 By Isaac Levendel and Bernard Weisz Enigma Books, 340 pages, $24 In the wine region of Châteauneuf-du-Pape in Provence, Château de la Gardine is an esteemed name, as is that of the proprietor who brought it to prominence, Gaston Brunel. Even today,…
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Books Caught Between Two Worlds
I Am Forbidden By Anouk Markovits Hogarth, 320 pages, $25 The title of Anouk Markovits’s English-language debut, “I Am Forbidden,” refers both to the tragic climax of the book and to the broader world of this novel, a world defined by forbiddenness. The allure of the forbidden is ever-present in the story, which spans several…
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Books Author Blog: The Future of the Past
Yehuda Kurtzer is the author of “Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past.” 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: In a recent Commentary article, Jack Wertheimer once again takes on the…
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Should Israel Have Gone With Yiddish?
Murray Lefkowitz of Merion Station, Pa., writes a letter stating his opinion that it “may have been an unfortunate choice” that Hebrew became the language of the state of Israel, since “Yiddish was the more common tongue for almost all Jews prior to 1948.” The claim that Yiddish, not Hebrew, was the real national language…
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American Words, Israeli Songs
Listening to the new album “Robin” by acclaimed actress and singer-songwriter Efrat Ben Zur, you wouldn’t know that the songs on it were sung by an Israeli artist, or that they were composed to the poems of 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson. But it is precisely this serendipitous combination that makes the album so captivating….
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