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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Simon Rich Is Charming as His Life
By just about any measure, Simon Rich, 28, has had an enviable career. Son of famed New York Times columnist and theater critic Frank Rich, stepson of author Alex Witchel, younger brother of novelist Nathaniel Rich, he attended New York’s prestigious Dalton School, then went on to Harvard, where he edited the famed Harvard Lampoon…
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The Gospel According to Feuding Academics
The Jewish Gospels By Daniel Boyarin The New Press, 224 pages, $21.95 The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other By Peter Schäfer Princeton University Press, 370 pages, $35 As someone who writes in the academic world and the worlds of journalism, activism and the popular press, I’ve been painfully aware of some…
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Books Author Blog: A Yiddishist in Vilnius
Steve Stern’s most recent book, “The Book of Mischief,” 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 had fun in Vilnius, despite my low tolerance for fun. Not to…
The Latest
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The Jews Who Plumbed Hitler’s Brain
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts By Daniel Pick Oxford University Press, 368 pages, $35 More than 20 years ago, Neal Gabler declared that Hollywood was the creation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In his remarkable book “An Empire of Their Own,” Gabler in fact suggested that the Meyers…
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Good Night, Vienna
Vienna-born potter Lucie Rie, who is the subject of Emmanuel Cooper’s biography “Lucie Rie: Modernist Potter,” shows how a Jewish artist can express Yiddishkeit in creativity despite repeated assimilations. Rie, who lived from 1902 to 1995, was the daughter of Dr. Benjamin Gomperz, an ear, nose and throat specialist and a friend of Sigmund Freud….
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David Brooks Channels ‘Perplexed’ Maimonides
A column on the Obama-Romney race by political and social commentator David Brooks in the August 20 New York Times bore the caption “Guide for the Perplexed.” Brooks was trying to give some helpful counsel to undecided voters trying to make up their minds, and either he or the editors of the column thought this…
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The Sacred and the Profane
In a 1935 review of “Porgy and Bess,” Virgil Thomson, one of America’s most distinguished music critics, famously dismissed George Gershwin’s music as a form of “gefilte fish orchestration,” harshly consigning it to the ghetto of Jewish music rather than situating it within the broad expanse of American culture. Lazare Saminsky, Thomson’s contemporary and a…
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Books Author Blog: The Presence of the Past
Earlier this week, Kati Marton wrote about the French Jewish family the Camondos and Paris’s black marble plaques. 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: Now that I live part-time in Paris,…
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Exile on Second Street
Director Chantal Akerman was back on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She was standing in front of her audience at Anthology Film Archives, a film society so hip that there was a line of people around the block, still waiting to get into the screening of her newest movie, “La Folie Almayer,” a very loose adaptation…
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Books Author Blog: Remembering the Camondos
Earlier this week, Kati Marton wrote about Paris’s black marble plaques and the subject of race in France. 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: Now that I live part-time in Paris,…
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Digital Learners Can’t Do It On Own
You know me, right? I’m the one you call to fix your computer or set the clock in your car, the one you can count on to have the latest electronic gadgets. But I am coming to you now as an educator with the unique privilege (and challenge) of working with today’s generation of so-called…
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