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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Her Husband Is Not a Mensch
In April 1907, a frazzled Forverts reader wrote in to the newspaper’s advice column, the Bintel Brief, entreating the editor “not to write which city this comes from.” Her life, she wrote, is terrible. Her husband is “truly not a mensch.” What should she do? Liana Finck reimagines this story in graphic form as part…
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Making Sense of Anti-Semitism
A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism By Phyllis Goldstein Facing History and Ourselves, 432 pages, $17.95 Historian Victor Tcherikover used to say that there are few things that have a history of 2,000 years. Anti-Semitism is one of them. And indeed, in our own day, the taxonomy of anti-Semitism yet includes religious and secular…
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Books Author Blog: Stumbling Stones
Leslie Maitland is the author of Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed. 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: . In 1989 I accompanied…
The Latest
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Peace Process? Fuhgeddaboudit!
The daily English edition of the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz, which also appears in an Internet version, has always struck me as a prodigious feat of translation. Day after day — or, more precisely, night after night — a battery of anonymous translators, working like galley slaves under enormous time pressure, takes the Hebrew paper, itself…
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Sumptuous Feast for Jewish Studies
Gender and Jewish History Edited by Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore Indiana University Press, 428 pages, $27.95 Imagine sitting down for delicious tapas at a long table with a group of old friends. The flavors are nuanced and varied, while the conversation is lively, provocative and deeply engaging. Reading “Gender and Jewish History,”…
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Books Day Schools and the End of the Melting Pot
Earlier this week, Jonathan Krasner discussed his use of the word “boys” and the magic of summer camp. 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 met Peter Beinart in 1999 when…
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Murder Most Lovely
The success of the tabloid — epitomized but not monopolized by the besieged citadel of Murdoch — relies, for the most part, on two things: the rhythmic titillation of its headlines, and eye-catching photographs of things not meant to be seen. Writing, it need not be said, is beside the point. Flip through the pages…
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Finding Jewish Life in Eastern Europe
Pavel Fried was born in the village of Třebíč, Czechoslovakia, in 1930. Fried lived a middle-class Jewish life; he was in the midst of preparations for his bar mitzvah when his family was deported to Terezin. In the camp, he told interviewers from the Vienna-based oral history project Centropa, he had a secret ceremony. Pavel…
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Looking Back: June 1, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward Through an advertisement he placed in the Forverts, Berel Cohn found his father, Avrom Yingerman, whom he hasn’t seen in 25 years. Yingerman, who hails from the Polish town Brisk, divorced his wife 25 years ago and left her and their three children in Poland. He went to New…
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Cultural Critic or Complainer-in-Chief?
Farther Away By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $26 On the last page of the last essay in his new collection, “Farther Away,” Jonathan Franzen bombards the reader with a rapid-fire list of provocative and typically Franzenian questions: What is the point of meaning — especially literary meaning — in a rabid…
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Books Author Blog: The Magic of Summer Camp
Earlier this week, National Jewish Book Award winner Jonathan Krasner discussed his use of the word “boys” in “Benderly boys.” 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: When my 10-year-old daughter heads…
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