This Week in Forward Arts and Culture

By Ezra Glinter July 16, 2010

Nadja Spiegelman interviews Miryam Kabakov, author of the essay collection “Keep Your Wives Away From Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires.”

Zohar Tirosh-Polk goes to see “Hapless Holigan in ‘Still Moving,’” a collaboration between cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the modern dance company Pilobolus.

Paul Buhle remembers Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg, two counter-cultural Jews who died earlier this week.

Gal Beckerman reviews “Super Sad True Love Story,” the dystopian satire from New Yorker “20 under 40” writer Gary Shteyngart.

Akin Ajayi looks at “Untaken Photographs,” an exhibit in Tel Aviv curated by photography scholar Ariella Azoulay.

Joshua Furst squirms a little, but ultimately approves of Al Pacino’s performance in “The Merchant of Venice.”

Philologos deciphers how, thanks to MIT, Hebrew can help us understand the even more ancient language of Ugaritic, and vice versa.

Harriet Hartman dissects “Tours that Bind,” a new book by sociologist Shaul Kelner that tries to figure out how Birthright Israel achieves its identity-building effect.

Henrik Eger talks to Doug Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who wrote “I Am My Own Wife” about German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf.

And I discuss the life and work of Boris Lurie, a Holocaust survivor and New York artist whose work is being revisited two years after his death.

Also, in the latest from the Forverts video channel, Shmuel Perlin, a “New York Jew in China,” reports on disappearing languages in China:

Ezra Glinter is the critic-at-large of the Forward.

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