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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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…
The Latest
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How Jewish Artists Helped Reinvent Chicago
In Chicago, The Spertus Museum has just opened “Jewish Modernists in Chicago,” the seventh chapter in its eight-part series, “Uncovered & Rediscovered: Stories of Jewish Chicago.” This new exhibit focuses on the artistic influence of a group of Jewish artists active in Chicago in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. The entire series is part of…
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For Adeena Karasick, Multimedia Is the Message
This Poem By Adeena Karasick Talonbooks, 128 pages, $19.95 New York Transit system’s Poetry in Motion series are coming back, and commuters are able to stretch their necks towards the MTA-curated chance of momentary transcendence amidst the array of newspapers and magazines, flashing screens of iphones and all manner of other unnamable devices. Adeena Karasick’s…
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Spies Who Came In From the Golan
Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service By Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal Ecco 400 pages $27.99 Rescuing the Air France hostages at Entebbe Airport. Capturing Adolf Eichmann and returning him to Israel. Avenging the murder of the Olympic athletes. It’s the stuff of legends — and films. And it has contributed to…
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Feminism Is Easy, Comedy Is Hard
We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy By Yael Kohen Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux 336 pages, $27 In the early 1980s, while I was reporting a story on female stand-ups for Ms. magazine, Adrianne Tolsch, the host at New York City’s Catch a Rising Star, agreed to arrange a special night…
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Books Poetics of Riverdale
When we think of great New York poets — Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Laurie Anderson, among others — what they’ve immortalized and exalted have been the streets and energies of Manhattan or, on rare and less transcendent occasions, Brooklyn. The Bronx, when it did appear, has always been something of the…
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Books Author Blog: Double Vision
Earlier, Tehila Lieberman wrote about two of the short stories from her collection “Venus in the Afternoon.” 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: Perhaps after I was born, someone sneaked into…
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Books When a Story Is Born Form First
Tehila Lieberman is the author of the short story collection “Venus in the Afternoon.” She is currently completing a novel entitled “The Last Holy Man.” 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:…
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In Praise of New Age Judaism
New Age Judaism gets a bad rap. It’s namby-pamby, critics say — indulgent, narcissistic. Maybe it’s not even Jewish. Never mind the fact that the Havurah movement, Jewish Renewal and Neo-Hasidism have significantly shaped mainstream Jewish prayer life (chances are, your mainline synagogue’s Friday night tunes were first sung by a hippie in Birkenstocks) as…
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