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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Thoughts That Move in Space
N18 (Complete) By Hank Lazer Singing Horse Press, 84 pages, $15 We associate the best literature with amnesia: While the book is open, we forget ourselves, curled up on a couch while the world melts away. Going through Hank Lazer’s latest poetry collection, “N18,” the reader is likely to experience precisely the opposite: Instead of…
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Books What Archivists Are Worth
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Like the making of history, the writing of history is a collaborative venture. It may look as if ideas are entirely the product of the individual imagination but, as any honest, straight-talking historian will tell you, they are the result of a group effort. The writer-cum-historian gets all the…
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Through Stained Glass, Brightly
If you were to poll the average American Jewish man and woman on the street about what constitutes normative American synagogue architecture, stained glass windows would probably be the very last thing that comes to mind. Some folks might be quick to conjure an image of an elaborately decorated Moorish-like interior; others, jokingly, might bring…
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Books Author Blog: Are You a Jewish Writer?
Joshua Henkin is the author of “The World Without You,” “Matrimony,” and “Swimming Across the Hudson.” 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: First of all, I want to open up my…
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A Guide for the Judgmental
A reader wishing to be identified only as “Harry” has a question about the Mishnaic tractate of Pirkei Avot or — as it is often called in English — “The Ethics of the Fathers.” (The Hebrew title literally means “Chapters of the Fathers,” the book being divided into six chapters in which many of the…
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‘Girls,’ Sex and the All New JAP
Within her first two minutes on screen, it’s evident that Shoshanna Shapiro is a Jewish American Princess. From perfectly coiffed hair to a pink Juicy Couture tracksuit to her admission that her parents are paying $2,100 a month for her Nolita apartment, Shoshanna, one of the four protagonists on the HBO show “Girls” — which…
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Life in British Mandate Palestine
Out of Palestine: The Making of Modern Israel By Hadara Lazar Atlas & Co., 304 pages, $25.95 Another book on “the making of Israel”? It was a scant few months ago that Gershom Gorenberg’s provocative and timely book, “The Unmaking of Israel,” was visited on the Jewish body politic. Now comes novelist Hadara Lazar’s book,…
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The Silver Age of Rock and Roll
Call it the “Mad Men” syndrome: These days, we’re nostalgic for other people’s youth. The symptoms present themselves most clearly when it comes to music. Since the world went digital, the recording industry has spent a lot of time in the vaults, coming up with packages that are meant to appeal to the completist in…
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Books To Vitebsk and Back Again
“Do the dead know that life still exists, somewhere?” the 17-year-old literature-loving, sex-obsessed Samuel Glass asks in “The Odyssey of Samuel Glass.” Since his adored father’s sudden death, he is desperate to leave the confines of his north London suburban home. His desire to “get away from the doom-laden cloud that pervaded the house” is…
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Death in Petrópolis
Viennese-born Jewish author Stefan Zweig and his second wife, Lotte Altmann, committed suicide together as refugees in Brazil in February 1942, but Zweig’s works, whether fiction, biographies or letters, have never seemed more alive. Seventy years on, the former home in Petrópolis where he died, now known as Casa Stefan Zweig, is scheduled to [open…
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Hasidic Tales and Prayer-Poems
A Hidden Light: Stories and Teachings of Early HaBaD and Bratzlav Hasidism By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi with Netanel Miles-Yepez Gaon Books, 490 pages, $31.95 All Breathing Life Adores Your Name: At the Interface Between Poetry and Prayer By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi Gaon Books, 212, pages, $18.95 In her introduction to “A Hidden Light,” Susannah Heschel notes that…
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