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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Why Are American Jews So Liberal?
Why are Jews so liberal? Every few years, the question gets asked, often with the unspoken follow-up “… and what can we do to change that?” This year, Republican super PACs are drooling with anticipation. If you think the attacks on Mitt Romney by Sheldon Adelson — I mean Gingrich — I mean a Super-PAC…
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Jewish Gangsters Get Their Day at Museum
In the mid-20th century, a cadre of tough Jews, shedding the bookish bearing of exile, went forth to create a new society in a forbidding desert. Armed to the teeth, they lived outside the law and built their outpost by any means necessary. Against all odds, despite implacable enemies, the desert bloomed. Think you already…
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Books Author Blog: Waiting Too Long To Teach About Israel
Mitchell Bard is the author/editor of 22 books, including “Israel Matters” and “The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East.” His blog posts are being 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,…
The Latest
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Arikha’s Art of Rigor and Confrontation
Avigdor Arikha’s first New York exhibition since 2007 is an unflinching record of how he apprehended the world. Since his breakthrough 1973 conversion from abstraction to “post-abstract representational painting,” Arikha’s paintings, drawings and prints of friends, family, himself and familiar locations, were done, without exception, during one daylight sitting. Looking at Arikha’s impressive and complex…
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Difference Between a Slob and a ‘Zhlob’
Judith Ronat writes from Kfar Saba in Israel: “The etymologies in my dictionary don’t support any connection, but I would like to hear your opinion. Is there any connection between the Yiddish word zhlob and the English ‘slob’?” There is a connection, but it’s not etymological. Rather, it’s that English “slob” has influenced the meaning…
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Books Author Blog: Where the Debate on Judaism Began
Earlier this week, Rabbi Barry Schwartz wrote about needing more Jewish debate and the first Jewish debate. His blog posts are being featured this week 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: The mid-19th century in Germany…
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Etgar Keret Copes With Newfound Fame
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door By Etgar Keret Translated by Nathan Englander, Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston FSG Originals, 208 pages, $14 Once upon a time, Etgar Keret was a humble guy scribbling out weird and fantastical stories about Israel’s version of Generation X. With his first few books, he gained a reputation in…
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Tracing an Adoptee’s Novel Past
By Blood By Ellen Ullman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 387 pages, $27 “I am not adopted; I have mysterious origins.” It’s a line Ellen Ullman says she has repeated to herself many times, as an adopted person, and one she likes so much that she put it in the mouth of the central character in…
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Peter Beinart’s Big Zionist Experiment
The Crisis of Zionism By Peter Beinart Times Books, 304 pages, $26 It’s not often that the publication of a book is preceded by months of debate about its central argument. But that has been the fate of Peter Beinart’s “The Crisis of Zionism,” for which defenses and denunciations stretch back to 2010. It was…
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Books Author Blog: The First Jewish Debate
Earlier this week, Rabbi Barry Schwartz wrote about needing more Jewish debate. His blog posts are being featured this week 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: The first Jewish debate never ceases to amaze me. I…
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Books Moshe Kasher, a ‘Prodigy of Misconduct’
On the day of Moshe Kasher’s bris, his grandfather held him in his hands and declared, “This boy will be a great rabbi, I can see into his soul.” The old man’s prophesy almost came true. One of his grandsons did grow up to become a rabbi: Moshe’s brother, David. Moshe, meanwhile, grew into a…
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