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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Introducing Avraham Burg’s Torah Tent
More and more in our generation the Torah is claimed as the domain of a select few, whose interpretations are said to be authoritative for all. Avraham Burg reveals a new way of interpreting the weekly Torah reading, which seeks to return the Torah to its rightful owners – all of us. Written from a…
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Looking Back: October 28
100 Years Ago in the Forward On trial for running a prostitution ring, Morris Cohen, a resident of New York City’s Lower East Side, pleaded not guilty. His defense was based on the fact that he was a drunk and was not in command of his faculties when he was pimping young women. Unfortunately for…
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Sarah Glidden on the J14
When Haaretz wanted graphic artists to illustrate Israel’s J14 tent protests from the summer they called upon a number of Israel’s finest artists and also upon Sarah Glidden, author of “How To Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less.” At the Haaretz site Glidden’s comic has Hebrew dialogue, but here all four pages are reproduced…
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Books Serious Biblical Thought, in Paperback
Avivah Zornberg’s classic studies of Genesis and Exodus are now available in paperback. That itself is a strange thing, because if you enter the home of most scholars of ancient Jewish texts, the books lining their walls will be leather-bound volumes with titles printed on the spine in gold or silver lettering — a Jewish…
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Books A Sukkah Occupies Wall Street
Last week, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote about Sukkot and social justice and asked discussed the importance of place. Her 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: As I write this blog…
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Taking Politics Out of the Trotsky Debate
Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life By Joshua Rubenstein Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25 During much of the 20th century, Leon Trotsky’s legacy was a source of strife on both the left and right — and 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the scholarly controversy surrounding Trotsky has yet to fall into…
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Books Does Place Matter?
Last week, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote about Sukkot and social justice. Her most recent book, “Where Justice Dwells: A Hands-On Guide to Doing Social Justice in Your Jewish Community” is now available. Her posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog…
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‘Protect Life Act’ Continues the War on Women
While the economy stagnates and many additional issues ought to be at the top of their agenda, House Republicans are still fixated on policing the uteruses of America. The “War on Women,” the name given to an onslaught of state and federal laws that have restricted abortion, birth control and women’s health care in an…
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Books Yid Lit: Jeffery Eugenides
It’s rare to find a novelist and Ivy League professor on a billboard in Times Square. Though Jeffrey Eugenides rises above Broadway in wind-blown clothes, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Middlesex” and “The Virgin Suicides” is a soft-spoken Michigan native who describes himself as equal parts hillbilly and Greek. In his new novel, “The…
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Bearing Silent Witness
Until the Dawn’s Light By Aharon Appelfeld, Translated by Jeffrey M. Green Schocken Books, 240 pages, $26 ‘Until the Dawn’s Light” opens with a mother and son on the run. What they are escaping, as they travel by train from city to city across Europe, is revealed only just before the novel’s end. But there’s…
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An American Landscape Architect and His Sabra Designs
In tough economic times, parents may think twice about splashing out on a once-in-a-lifetime spectacular bar mitzvah voyage. But “A Life Spent Changing Places,” a posthumously published memoir by the American Jewish landscape designer Lawrence Halprin, who died in 2009 at age 93, offers justification for wild splurging. When the Bronx-born and Brooklyn-raised Halprin’s 13th…
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