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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Books
Meyers Dishes on Writing and Murder
Today, Alicia Oltuski interviews Randy Susan Meyers, who wrote “The Murderer’s Daughters,” about her experience touring the nation’s synagogues and JCCs with Jewish Book Council… and talking about domestic violence in Jewish communities. Oltuski’s blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
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Addicted to Love (and Drugs)
Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16 By Moshe Kasher Grand Central Publishing, 320 pages, $24.99 Flatscreen: A Novel By Adam Wilson Harper Perennial, 336 pages, $14.99 Since when did alcoholism and drug addiction become part of…
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Looking Back: March 16, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward The horse-poisoning trial of cloak maker Jacob Cohen began before Judge Otto Rosalsky. The trial opened with the first witness, a Pinkerton Detective, claiming to have caught Cohen in the act. The detective testified that he was on a stakeout on Market Street in front of Rubin’s Grocery Store…
The Latest
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Books Alternative Comics From Long Island
Lost and Found: Comics 1969-2003 By Bill Griffith Fantagraphics Books, 364 pages $35 Bill Griffith, the one prominent figure of underground comix to reach the daily comic page mainstream, has delivered again with a phone book-sized volume both odd and pleasing. It comes with a Long Island back-story. Life (suburban life, that is), found this…
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An Immigrant’s Life, Part 3
In 1906, Nasye Frug wrote to the Forverts about her life as a new wife and recent immigrant. Even before receiving unhelpful wedding gifts, she had realized that the Goldene Medina of the New World was not turning out to be quite the life she had imagined. Writing about her childhood in the Old Country…
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Books Author Blog: Writers Are Readers
Alicia Oltuski is the author of “Precious Objects: A Story of Diamonds, Family, and a Way of Life.” Alicia toured through Jewish Book Council’s Jewish Book Network this past year. Her 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….
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Review: The Goldfarb Bar Mitzvah
[ ![][2]][2] Theater, at its best, can thrill and inspire us, can take us to another world, can even make us feel that we, ourselves, are growing into new and better people. If only that had been the case at the new off-off-off Broadway production of “Aaron Goldfarb’s Bar Mitzvah,” which opened last Saturday at…
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Samson To Appeal Juicing Charges
[ ![][2]][2] NEW YORK — The competitive demolition community is in an uproar after the urine sample of Samson “The Danite” Zoraker tested positive for performance enhancing substances this weekend. “I’m totally innocent,” Samson claimed on Monday at a press conference. “I’ve never used any controlled substances, except for my hair.” Jewish slugger and National…
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Christmas, Hanukkah or Apocalypse?
[ ![][2]][2] If you’re a Jewish parent like me, you always dread December. There’s the relentless onslaught of Christmas carols and decorations. The perpetual question of, “Do I try to compete and distort Hanukkah, or honor the holiday but nonpluss my kids?” And, worst of all for a Jew, there’s all that wintertime indoor-heat chafing….
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Books Q&A: Michael Ian Black on ‘Doing it Right’
Speaking with The Arty Semite over the phone, Michael Ian Black paused and said: “That’s weird. I’m in the hotel hallway walking towards my room. On the carpet I see a pair of underwear and recognize them as my own. Now why in the world is a pair of my own underwear sitting in the…
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Scientist Discovers Plaid in the Spectrum
[ ![][2]][2] Organic food stores, children’s book publishers, LGBT groups and leprechauns have been thrown into turmoil by the discovery by Noah Obadiah, a professor at the Technion in Haifa, of an extra color in the rainbow. Although he discovered the color nestling between blue and indigo several months ago, he was waiting for the…
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