This Week in Forward Arts and Culture

By Ezra Glinter September 8, 2010

The Arty Semite — along with the rest of the Forward — will be off Thursday and Friday for Rosh Hashanah. Here, then, is this week’s Arts & Culture section, just in time to print out and smuggle into shul between the pages of your machzor. (May we also recommend, as a New Year’s treat, a subscription to the very elegant print edition of the Forward.) A gut gebenscht yor to you all!

• Michael Kaminer chats with songstress Clare Burson, whose album “Silver and Ash” is out next week on Rounder Records.

• Philologos observes that 5771 is a “pregnant” year. Now what does that mean?

• Jay Michaelson looks ahead to see how we can make Yom Kippur more than just an occasion for pseudo-solemnity.

• Jenna Weissman Joselit deciphers a seemingly inscrutable family keepsake.

• Dan Friedman interviews Ruth Gruber, a 99-year-old journalist and the subject of the recent documentary film “Ahead of Time: The Extraordinary Journey of Ruth Gruber,” which was reviewed in the Forward last week.

• In an excerpt from their book “With All Thine Heart,” cultural critic and Forward contributor Ilan Stavans talks to Zeek magazine contributing editor Mordecai Drache about love in the Bible.

• Plus, HEEB has let loose their top 10 list in comics for 5770, featuring, in the #1 slot, Vanessa Davis for her autobiographical collection “Make Me a Woman.” David will also be participating in the Forward-sponsored “Graphic Details: Confessional Comics By Jewish Women,” opening October 1 at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. In the meantime you can check out Davis’s “Jewish Chops,” a collaboration with the late Harvey Pekar, here.

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

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