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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Hey, Mr. Banana Man
The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King By Rich Cohen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pages, $27 The cover of Rich Cohen’s engrossing tale of the life of Sam Zemurray shows a banana sprouting from Zemurray’s head like a big curved penis. If you accept that analogy, then…
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Pleasant, Pleasanter and Pleasanter-er
Rabbi Richard Hammerman of Caldwell, N.J., writes about my column of May 4, in which I said it was “pleasanter” to contemplate the origins of the expression “finger-lickin’ good” than it was to contemplate an Iranian nuclear bomb: “I always enjoy your columns and learn something new and often useful from them. But ‘pleasanter,’ not…
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Books Author Blog: What’s In a Name?
Jonathan B. Krasner is the author of the National Jewish Book Award winning title “The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education.” Krasner was also a finalist for the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author…
The Latest
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Conviction, Compassion and Outrage
Hundreds of dialects can be heard in America’s most diverse city, yet New York’s lingua franca is the language of change. Natives or newbies, New Yorkers are known for voicing strong views about why things need to be different. Here, love and hate spur movements, mobilize the masses, draw people into the streets and across…
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Jesus: Father, Husband, Family Man
“The Jesus Discovery: The Resurrection Tomb that Reveals the Birth of Christianity” By James D. Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $27.95 In 1835, David Strauss published “The Life of Jesus Critically Examined,” which debunked the miraculous elements of the New Testament and inaugurated the modern recovery of the “real Jesus.” Strauss…
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Books Author Blog: Tisha B’Av and the Olympic Games
Earlier this week, Dvora Meyers wrote about being an Orthodox Jewish gymnast and the designer of her book cover. 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: What happens when the saddest day…
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Evolutionary Biology After Auschwitz
May 20 marks the 10th anniversary of the death, at age 60, of evolutionary biologist and popular author Stephen Jay Gould. That’s an excellent excuse to relish seven paperback reprints of his work, out last fall from Harvard University Press. Included are “Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History” and “I Have Landed: The…
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Soccer Final Pits Jewish History Vs Jewish Oligarch
The most important game in the world this year, in America’s fastest growing team sport, takes place on Saturday May 19. And, because they don’t have a representative on the field, American Jews may feel a little left out. But, as Alan Rothenberg — who presided over the soccer World Cup in America in 1994…
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Books Author Blog: It Takes Two
Earlier this week, Dvora Meyers wrote about being an Orthodox Jewish gymnast. 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: As a writer, I’ve paid scant attention to the images that accompany my…
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Broiling Mojave Spawns ‘Angry Buddhist’
The Angry Buddhist By Seth Greenland Europa Editions, 400 pages, $16 This year, my wife and I celebrated Passover in the Mojave Desert. In a rented house on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, we had an intimate Seder with friends as the glaring light lowered into dusk. After the meal, we went outside…
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Taking a Second Look at Lillian Hellman
A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman By Alice Kessler-Harris Bloomsbury Press, 448 pages, $30 I don’t know that I have ever read this good a rescue job. Columbia historian Alice Kessler-Harris’s biography of dramatist and screenwriter Lillian Hellman made me feel like a stupid cliché: just another American who knows…
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