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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Looking Back: January 13, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward A fire occurred at New York City’s Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society, a Jewish orphanage on 151st Street and Broadway. More than 700 children live in the orphanage, and they were all on different floors when the fire, which started at a construction site next to the orphanage, broke out….
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New Words Coined To Exclude Women
Hadarat nashim, translatable as “the exclusion of women,” is a Hebrew phrase with which few Israelis would have been familiar several months ago. Now there are even fewer, if any, who are unfamiliar with it. After first coming to the public’s attention late last summer over the issue of excusing Orthodox soldiers in the Israeli…
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The Future of Publishing?
There is no doubt that e-books are a bright spot in the dismal economics of publishing. The current market is strong — according to a recent Harris Interactive poll, one in six Americans now uses an e-reader, and that number will grow as consumers become more comfortable with the technology. Actually, the potential for growth…
The Latest
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Sorcerer for the Goose and Gander
A reader who may prefer to remain anonymous sends me an email in which he describes recently hearing his sister call his elderly mother a “machashefer,” a term with which he was not familiar. The letter continues: “I asked my sister what she meant by ‘machashefer,’ and she said it’s a witch. She then told…
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Chicago’s Love And Shame
Love and Shame and Love By Peter Orner Little, Brown, 448 pages, $24.99 Part epic, part bildungsroman, Peter Orner’s “Love and Shame and Love” is a refreshing departure from the shtetl nostalgia shtick that has come to typify contemporary American Jewish fiction. Orner’s characters are complex, but their quirks, like their Jewishness, are the stuff…
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After Memories, Modernism
Parallel Stories By Péter Nádas Translated by Imre Goldstein Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1,152 pages, $40 Published in 1986, during the waning days of János Kádár’s stewardship of Hungarian communism (and translated into English in 1997), Péter Nádas’s “A Book of Memories” represented for Susan Sontag the culmination of her hopes for the high modernist…
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Books From Scratch
Earlier this week, Stanley Ginsberg wrote about the meaning of a Jewish bakery and the sweet and sour sides of life. His 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: One…
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Bintel Briefs Way Ahead of Times
The explosive popularity of the Yiddish advice column published in the Forverts from 1906 paved the way first for a genre and then an entire industry. Although it seems self-evident to us now, writing to a newspaper for advice was a revolutionary idea. Click to view a slideshow. The Bintel Brief (literally “bundle of letters”)…
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Saved by Kvass
Translated by Miriam Hoffman and Beverly Koenigsberg This story originally appeared in the Forverts of August 30, 1985. In addition to the 200 major languages currently in use, new forms of expression continue to emerge. These new means of communication deal for the most part with specialized professions — such as linguistics, psychology, statistics and…
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How ‘Sh— Girls Say’ Changed My Life
Earlier this month a humor video called “Shit Girls Say” hit the web. I found it mildly amusing, but not necessarily funny or cutting enough to deserve the over 7 million hits it would get in a few weeks. But then it kind of changed my life. The shtick with “Shit Girls Say,” which began…
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Adrienne Cooper Embodied Progressive Spirit
It is hard to imagine the world without Adrienne Cooper, a friend said to me on learning that she was near death. As she did for so many others, she enriched my life for decades with thrilling song, wise words, and trenchant humor. She is perhaps best known as a concert and recording artist, one…
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