This is the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
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Books Yiddish Tomes Go Digital With DIY Scanner
It’s a scenario that the Yiddish writers of yore could never have predicted, and yet by which they likely would have been tickled: Today, their work is being digitized with the help of a home-made scanner built by a former Baptist from Indiana who lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. As of mid…
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Books Is the U.S. Getting Better at Soccer?
Getty Images As Team USA carries the hopes of the English-speaking world in Brazil, inquiring minds are wondering why England is so perennially terrible at the sport it invented (and let’s not get started on cricket). It is a question that was surprisingly well answered in 2009, along with the corollary question about how America…
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Books From One Soccer Writer to Another
There are two Jonathan Wilsons writing about soccer in a knowledgeable way. One is Jonathan Wilson from the Guardian, arguably the foremost journalistic expert on tactics in the modern game, the other is Jonathan Wilson, the Tufts University Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, who covered the 1994 World Cup for The New Yorker and…
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Books Jewish Roots of the ‘Beautiful Game’
British Jews have never accounted for more than 1% of the population. And their contribution to soccer has always been obscured. But, in his well-researched and compellingly-written history, “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?: The History of Football’s Forgotten Tribe,” Anthony Clavane explains the outsize contribution of British Jews to British soccer and their pivotal…
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Books Why Soccer Creates the Best Middle East Dialogue
Getty Images Thinkers from Cass Sunstein to Eli Pariser in “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You,” have elucidated the threat to social discourse posed by the Internet. Increasingly able to insulate ourselves from disagreement, we live in bubbles of like-mindedness. From whichever angle, it’s epistemic closure in sociological jargon, “bullshit mountain”…
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Books Abraham Klein, The Greatest Soccer Referee
Image courtesy Abraham Klein Israel has reached the World Cup finals just once — Mexico 1970 — where, after losing to Uruguay and tying with Sweden and Italy, it failed to progress beyond the group stage. That year in Mexico, though, there was an outstanding Israeli success — referee Abraham Klein. An unlikely figure to…
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Books When Getting Girl Means Pretending To Be Transgender
Photo: Chloe Aftel Call it a boy-meets-girl-who-thinks-boy-was-born-a-girl story. In “Adam,” the debut novel from cult graphic memoirist Ariel Schrag, an awkward California teenager named Adam Freedman parachutes into an alien landscape of subcultures and identities when he joins his lesbian sister in Brooklyn for the summer. (Full disclosure: Schrag was featured in “Graphic Details: Confessional…
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Books David Bezmozgis Turning ‘Natasha’ Into Film
Photo: David Franco A decade after its publication, Canadian author David Bezmozgis is turning his debut short story collection, “Natasha and Other Stories,” into a film. As with “Victoria Day,” his first cinematic endeavor in 2009, Bezmozgis, a graduate of the University of Southern California’s film school, is both writing and directing the project. The…
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Music How a swaggering Jewish kid from East London became (albeit briefly) Britain’s greatest rock star and poet
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News That whites-only, no Jews allowed Arkansas community is legal, says state’s attorney general. How?
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Opinion As an Israeli political scientist, I resisted thinking this war was a genocide. Here’s what changed my mind
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News In a first, Orthodox rabbinical school ordains an out gay rabbi
In Case You Missed It
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Culture On a tour of Hasidic Brooklyn, this rabbi doesn’t have all the answers — but he knows who does
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Opinion Which school of philosophy provides the best guide for how to think about Gaza?
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Culture Everything’s terrible — but at least there are Moomins
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Culture Roman Polanski’s take on the Dreyfus Affair is perfect for 2025. That’s the problem
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