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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A Poem of One’s Own
A.M. Klein: The Letters By A.M. Klein Edited by Elizabeth A. Popham University of Toronto Press, 504 pages, $85 Those of us involved with Jewish life and culture in the Diaspora must often ask ourselves a fundamental question: Do we view ourselves as one among many minority cultures that comprise our larger society? Or do…
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Cataloguing the ‘Missed Destiny of Death’
Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II Edited by Martin Dean Geoffrey P. Megargee, General Editor Indiana University Press, 2,036 pages, $236 Over the past two decades, a number of essential works have contributed to both our knowledge of the Nazi regime during World War II and its plans to conquer Europe and eventually…
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Was Adolf Hitler Leader or Follower?
Hitler: A Biography By Ian Kershaw W.W. Norton, 1,030 pages, $25.95 Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich By Robert Gerwarth Yale University Press, 336 pages, $35 Heinrich Himmler: A Life By Peter Longerich Oxford University Press, 1,072 pages, $34.95 Those who can, make history; those who can’t, write history; those who can’t write history write…
The Latest
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Books Author Blog: Mother/Writer
Earlier this week, Ramona Ausubel wrote about why she’s a writer and not an actress. 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: I have been a writer for my whole adult life….
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Giving Voice to Kabbalah Masters
The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse From the Jewish Tradition Translated and annotated by Peter Cole Co-edited and with an afterword by Aminadav Dykman Yale University Press, 544 pages, $30 ‘There among the trees of God / … I’d enter the sacred shrine of the woods / … And as I sat at the edge…
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Books Author Blog: Why I Write
Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel “No One Is Here Except All of Us,” published by Riverhead Books. 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: Maybe there are four or…
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Sisters in Skivvies on the Lower East Side
Unterzakhn By Leela Corman Schocken, 208 pages, $24.95 Click to enlarge.
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What Should We Call Christian Bible?
Last week I dealt with the New American Haggadah, edited by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. A few days after writing the column, I noticed an op-ed by Foer in The New York Times in which he discussed the new Haggadah in light of his evolving relationship with Jewish tradition. Speaking about how raising children has…
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‘Homegrown’ Story of West Coast Jews
On my laptop I have a scan of a photo of my grandfather that always makes me smile. It’s not just the snap-brim fedora and my grandfather’s relatively unlined face; it’s also the car behind him, a giant, four-door, butterscotch-colored Buick that he bought for cash in the early 1970s. I have a host of…
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Meeting Fearless Dissidents Over Burgers
The fearless refuseniks who attempted to hijack an airplane on June 15, 1970, in Leningrad in order to draw attention to the plight of Soviet Jews were “Zionist hooligans” to Soviet authorities, but to the writer Gal Beckerman they are nothing less than superheroes. In the summer of 2006, Beckerman found himself at a barbecue…
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For Carlo Ginzburg, It’s Personal
A collection of essays by the profoundly original, intellectually wide-ranging, Italian-Jewish historian Carlo Ginzburg underlines the influence of Yiddishkeit on his achievement. “Threads and Traces: True False Fictive,” published recently by University of California Press, is an illuminating collection of chapters, deftly translated from the original Italian by Anne C. and John Tedeschi. An omnivorous…
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