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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Addicted to Aggadah
Drunken Angel By Alan Kaufman Viva Editions, 464 pages, $25 Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood By Peter Bebergal Soft Skull Press, 232 pages, $15.95 Jewish culture has always sought a balance between texts of the halachic, or legal realm, and those of the Aggadah, or narrative. Not only does the Aggadah explain…
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High Road to Jewish Unconscious
From Andre Breton in the 1920s until the disciples of Salvador Dali in the 1960s, the Surrealist art movement probed the subconscious through dreams and imagination in an attempt to liberate its practitioners and their audiences. It is no wonder, then, that it appealed to Jews who fled Europe in search of freedom in the…
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Tragic in Novels, Lucky in Friends
A terminal alcoholic who drank himself to death in 1939 at age 44, Joseph Roth, whose ideas about Judaism were often complex and contradictory, has long been an object of fascination. With the publication of his letters, attention has redoubled on the novels and journalism of that passionately pugnacious Austrian-Jewish writer. His work, and especially…
The Latest
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Books Author Blog: The Comedienne
Earlier this week, Leigh Stein wrote about the Jewish ghost of Santa Fe and revealed one of her early aspirations: to “Be Anne Frank.” Her blog posts have been 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,…
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No Lines in Sand for Eli Valley
When New York satirist and cartoonist Eli Valley heard about the Israeli anti-Semitic cartoon contest six years ago, he sent in the following cartoon: a grotesque Jew with two penises simultaneously sodomizing a Muslim woman and a Christian woman who are crying out to Allah and Jesus to save them. With one hand the Jew…
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Books Q&A: Sonia Taitz on Old Country and Oxford
Sonia Taitz is, by her own admission, an overachiever. Yeshiva educated, she earned degrees in both psychology and English from Barnard College (Phi Beta Kappa, of course), a master’s in philosophy from Oxford University and a law degree from Yale University. Taitz is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and that crucially shaped the person she…
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Movement With Purpose
Hard on the heels of Israel’s summer protests for social justice, Dana Yahalomi, leader of the “performative research” group Public Movement, arrived in New York City, only to find the Occupy Wall Street movement camped in Zuccotti Square. Coming from the largest protests in her country’s history and being met with what is now a…
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Looking Back: February 24, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward A bloody war between rival gangs exploded on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Numerous shots were fired, bringing many residents onto the streets, where chaos reigned. Although many calls were placed to the police, the gangs had scattered by the time they arrived. Two gang members, 21-year-old Nathan Levi and…
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Books The Ghost
Earlier this week, Leigh Stein revealed one of her early aspirations: to “Be Anne Frank.” 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. For more information on the series, please visit: My fascination with New Mexico began in…
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What Is Nathan Englander Saying?
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank By Nathan Englander Knopf, 224 pages, $24.95 You have to clamber over the bodies of Anne Frank and Raymond Carver to reach Nathan Englander’s new stories. With all the ghosts, comparisons and cultural baggage, it’s a messy business, not least because the drying footprints of…
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Books The Diarist
Leigh Stein’s debut novel, “The Fallback Plan,” is now available. 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. For more information on the series, please visit: Before I’d settled on acting or writing, my greatest aspiration was simply…
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