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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Living With Isaac Bashevis Singer
Who could live with Isaac Bashevis Singer? The sexual escapades of the most successful Yiddish writer in America — and the one whom most Yiddish literati loved to hate — were public knowledge, in large part because he himself built his reputation as a Casanova in his own fiction, where he was chased into the…
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Books Author Blog: The Return of Eli Gershonson
Gerald Kolpan’s newest book, “Magic Words: The Tale of a Jewish Boy-Interpreter, the World’s Most Estimable Magician, a Murderous Harlot, and America’s Greatest Indian Chief,” is now available. 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…
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From Siberia To the Lower East Side
Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish Drama By Barbara Henry University of Washington Press, 276 pages, $35 Barbara Henry’s new book recounts a telling anecdote about the opening of Jacob Gordin’s first Yiddish play, in 1891. As the play progressed, the New York audience became restless; it wanted more songs and diversion than it received from…
The Latest
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How Do You Say ‘Freebie’ in Hebrew?
How do you say “freebie” in Hebrew? This was the question facing the daily newspaper Haaretz when called upon to translate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remark, delivered in Jerusalem in English on April 15, that the United States and Europe had given Iran a “freebie” by deferring further negotiations over its nuclear program until late…
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Books Acknowledging the Tenement Museum
Earlier this week Debra Spark wrote about meeting Adin Steinsaltz and why she makes her characters Jewish. 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: These days, when people write a book, they…
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Break Dancing Across the Green Line
“Hip-hop goes beyond race, religion or socioeconomic class,” according to Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris, hip-hop dancer and founder of Rennie Harris Puremovement, Philadelphia’s famed hip-hop dance company. “Whether you are from Philly or Cairo, you can connect with African-American arts, because they are about freedom.” His words had just been acid-tested by a month-long tour of…
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Looking Back: May 4, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward Reports are coming in offering details of a particularly brutal pogrom that recently took place in Fez, Morocco. Hundreds of Jews were killed and wounded, many Jewish women were raped, children were kidnapped and babies were slaughtered. The pogromists apparently were so vicious that they threw babies off of…
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Books Author Blog: Do My Characters Need To Be Jewish?
Earlier this week, Debra Spark wrote about meeting Adin Steinsaltz. 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: Should I show my husband my work? My sister? My mother? Students sometimes ask me…
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Battling Horror With the Absurd
Photographs by an artist who put clock springs and matchsticks in his nose to fool Nazis into mistaking him for an Aryan hang in galleries in the basement of the Art Institute of Chicago. Adjacent to them is an exhibit that includes a 1945 self-portrait by another artist, who is posing with the German eagle…
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Books Q&A: Accordion Author Marion Jacobson
Before Marion Jacobson discovered the accordion, she was a classical music critic for The Washington Post and an academic with a doctorate in ethnomusicology from New York University. But after wandering into Manhattan’s Main Squeeze accordion store in the fall of 2001, she knew she had found a new passion. So, needing to make space…
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Books Author Blog: Seeking Fact, Finding the Unknowable
Debra Spark’s newest book, “The Pretty Girl,” is now available. 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 literature, as in life, you may go looking for one thing, only to find…
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