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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Is Sony Pictures Classics Playing Oscar Favorites?
Sony Pictures Classics (SPC) is one of the leading distributors of foreign and art-house films in America. This year they have three films nominated at the Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language film category: “In Darkness,” the Polish Holocaust-themed film by director Agnieszka Holland (“Europa, Europa”); “Footnote,” the Israeli award-winning film from second time…
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It’s E-asy Doing Israeli Dance
When the brash new Company E marks its debut with an all-Israeli program of choreography, someone notify the fire inspectors of downtown Washington, D.C. “I wanted to pick work that will set your hair on fire,” former government policy wonk turned choreographer and producer Paul Gordon Emerson said about why he set his sights on…
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Books Author Blog: Moses and Hubris
Adam Wilson’s debut novel, “Flatscreen,” is now available. 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: There’s a great “Seinfeld” episode — and one I relate to — in which…
The Latest
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Gene Pinpoints Heritage, Causes Concern
The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA By Jeff Wheelwright W.W. Norton and Company, 260 pages, $26.95 A diagnosis of breast cancer presents a lot of questions. Should you start with chemotherapy, or opt for surgery right away? Do you remove the tumor alone, or the entire breast? What about prophylactic…
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Addicted to Aggadah
Drunken Angel By Alan Kaufman Viva Editions, 464 pages, $25 Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood By Peter Bebergal Soft Skull Press, 232 pages, $15.95 Jewish culture has always sought a balance between texts of the halachic, or legal realm, and those of the Aggadah, or narrative. Not only does the Aggadah explain…
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I’ve Been Thinking ‘Bout the Railroad
Maurice Wolfthal writes from Houston: “I recently enjoyed Theodore Bikel’s rendition of the Yiddish song ‘Di Ban’ [‘The Train’] after not having heard it for more than 30 years. Part of the humor stems from his choice of dialect. Where most Yiddish speakers use the vowel ‘oy,’ he uses the ‘ey’ of English ‘grey,’ as…
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High Road to Jewish Unconscious
From Andre Breton in the 1920s until the disciples of Salvador Dali in the 1960s, the Surrealist art movement probed the subconscious through dreams and imagination in an attempt to liberate its practitioners and their audiences. It is no wonder, then, that it appealed to Jews who fled Europe in search of freedom in the…
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Tragic in Novels, Lucky in Friends
A terminal alcoholic who drank himself to death in 1939 at age 44, Joseph Roth, whose ideas about Judaism were often complex and contradictory, has long been an object of fascination. With the publication of his letters, attention has redoubled on the novels and journalism of that passionately pugnacious Austrian-Jewish writer. His work, and especially…
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Books Author Blog: The Comedienne
Earlier this week, Leigh Stein wrote about the Jewish ghost of Santa Fe and revealed one of her early aspirations: to “Be Anne Frank.” Her blog posts have been 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,…
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No Lines in Sand for Eli Valley
When New York satirist and cartoonist Eli Valley heard about the Israeli anti-Semitic cartoon contest six years ago, he sent in the following cartoon: a grotesque Jew with two penises simultaneously sodomizing a Muslim woman and a Christian woman who are crying out to Allah and Jesus to save them. With one hand the Jew…
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Books Q&A: Sonia Taitz on Old Country and Oxford
Sonia Taitz is, by her own admission, an overachiever. Yeshiva educated, she earned degrees in both psychology and English from Barnard College (Phi Beta Kappa, of course), a master’s in philosophy from Oxford University and a law degree from Yale University. Taitz is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and that crucially shaped the person she…
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