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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Samuel Beckett’s Letters Reveal Roots of Resistance
Although Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett is known for his tragicomically inert characters, he himself was an anti-Nazi activist during World War II. Unlike the ever-absent Godot, the bedridden vagrant protagonist of his novel “Molloy” or the despairing characters in his play “Endgame” who lack legs and the ability to stand, Beckett — though painfully…
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Looking Back: November 4, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward Joseph Pulitzer, famed publisher of the New York World and the St. Louis Post Dispatch, has died. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1847 to Jewish parents, Pulitzer arrived in the United States during the Civil War, 18 years old and penniless. Although he didn’t know a word of English,…
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Books Who Will Shelter Shalom Auslander?
Anyone who knows Shalom Auslander’s work knows he is haunted by the past — both his own personal past and the collective Jewish one. But for the sake of potential new readers, he is making this fact abundantly clear in the trailers he has made for his soon-to-be-released novel, “Hope: A Tragedy.” In the trailers,…
The Latest
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Noah’s Flour and Abraham’s Torah
Genesis 5:9–11:32 For years I was extremely critical of Noah. I didn’t like his silent character, his failure to open his mouth, to utter even a single word of protest as God stormed across the world in his murderous, watery rage. Unlike Abraham at Sodom, unlike Moses facing the sin of the Golden Calf. I…
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How Jews Became the People of the Talmud
Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures By Talya Fishman University of Pennsylvania Press, 424 pages, $65 Basic to Jewish religious teaching is the distinction between “written” Torah — Scripture, the Jewish Bible — and so-called “oral” Torah, a diffuse tradition of legal and homiletic rabbinic commentary…
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Music ‘Wild Flag’ Jewesses Keep Rockin’ Hard
I recently went down to the Bowery Ballroom to see the rock band Wild Flag perform. They’re a fairly new all-female rock group consisting of two of Sleater-Kinney’s Jewish former members, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss, and two other pioneering female rockers, Rebecca Cole and Mary Timony. I’d been listening to their new album, “Wild…
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Books Great Women, Cut Short
Trina Robbins is the author of the just-released “Lily Renee, Escape Artist,” the Jewish superhero comic book “GoGirl!” and many other books. Her 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: Today…
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‘Relatively Speaking’ Boasts Big Names, Little Else
One can’t help but experience a certain amount of culture shock after wading through the throngs of Occupy Wall Street protesters in Times Square en route to a seat in a Broadway theater. The consumerist impulse is nowhere more ritualized than on Broadway, where for $65 to $250 a seat, you can watch movie stars…
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Lost Poems Shed Light on Jerome Rothenberg’s Work
Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems, 1955-2010 By Jerome Rothenberg Junction Press, 178 pages, $21 Author and translator of nearly 100 books of poetry as well as editor of numerous groundbreaking anthologies, poet Jerome Rothenberg is turning 80 this year. A retrospective of his work has long been overdue. Yet Rothenberg, who throughout his literary career…
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Adam’s Rib
One of the great joys of my life is in the study of Jewish texts. Every time I read one, even if the story is familiar to me, I am grateful to be part of a religion that rewards questioning and debate and has such a rich literature that you can mine its depths again…
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Jews Try To Ban Offensive Music
Had you been checking out the celebrity gossip website TMZ.com during Rosh Hashanah services — what else are iPhones for? — you might have been amused to learn that the rapper Tyrese was banned from the biggest hip-hop radio station in Delaware for addressing his audience as “homies.” Almost as entertaining was the news this…
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