Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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The Folly of Yearning for Broadway
Broadway Baby By Alan Shapiro Algonquin Books, 272 Pages, $13.95 In his debut novel, “Broadway Baby,” Alan Shapiro, the author of nine volumes of poetry, gives the much-maligned 1950s-era Jewish Mother a chance to tell her story. It seems in the 50 years since the appearance of Philip Roth’s comic and overbearing archetype, the male…
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Raising a Glass to America
Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition By Marni Davis NYU Press, 272 pages, $32 Sociologist Nathan Glazer has written that “a people’s relation to alcohol represents something very deep about it.” That this statement rings especially true for Jews is the premise of University of Georgia professor Marni Davis’s new book,…
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Slaves of Time
Bo – Go In Exodus 10:1–13:16 This week the story of the Exodus reaches its climax. The last plagues come down on Pharaoh and his house. The gates of Egypt are thrown open wide and “my people go.” Thus the Middle Eastern drama of days gone by, whose echoes still spark the imaginations and shape…
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Freud Family’s Secret Letters
The marriage of Martha Bernays and Sigmund Freud in 1886 united two distinguished German-Jewish families who hardly need more publicity, although clearly the clan had an aptitude for it. Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, would become known as the “father of public relations,” and Londoner Matthew Freud (a great-grandson of Sigmund) is currently…
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Strange Case of Daleds
Reader Reuven Kalifon wonders why Ashkenazi tradition calls the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet “daled” even though its name is spelled ת-ל-ד (read right to left, daled-lamed-taf) and the final, dagesh-less taf is always pronounced as an ‘s’ in the Ashkenazi world. This is the same taf that we have in the letter bet,…
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Toward a Global Jewish Cinema
The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema Edited by Lawrence Baron Brandeis University Press, 464 pages, $39.95 Following two speculative top-100 lists of Jewish movie moments and Jewish movies by Heeb and Tablet, respectively, the arrival of the more serious “The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema” is timely. Lawrence Baron, Nasatir Chair of Modern…
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Books Defining Kafkaesque
Earlier this week, James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel wrote about a man as puzzling as his stories, Kafka and the parable, and Tamar Yellin’s “Kafka in Bronteland.” Today, Kessel examines the Kafkaesque structure. Their blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish…
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A South Carolinian Among the Mormons
In 1853, Solomon Nunes Carvalho set out on the fifth and final expedition of explorer John Charles Frémont through the Rocky Mountains, in search of a westward railroad route to California along the 38th parallel. Carvalho, an observant Sephardic Jew born in Charleston, S.C., had never imagined himself an explorer. He was an artist —…
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Books Escaping the Past?
Earlier this week, James Patrick Kelly wrote about a man as puzzling as his stories and John Kessel examined Kafka and the parable. Today, Kelly discusses Sami Rohr Prize Winner Tamar Yellin and her story “Kafka in Bronteland.”Their blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council…
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Books Tortured Soul of Joseph Roth
Philip will have to make room for another Roth. The irony is that Joseph Roth, a Galician-born Austro-Hungarian Jewish writer, dead for nearly three quarters of a century, has never been more alive in the English speaking world. Translator Michael Hofmann, whose gifted ear has graced 11 of Roth’s titles including the recently published “Joseph…
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Ironies Behind A Stunning Synagogue
Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture By Joseph M. Siry University of Chicago Press, 736 pages, $65 When Rabbi Mortimer J. Cohen contacted Frank Lloyd Wright in November 1953 about designing a new sanctuary for his conservative congregation, Beth Sholom, in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park, the legendary architect had…
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