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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Chilik Frank Brings Soul of Hasidism to Klezmer
For my bar mitzvah, my great-uncle gave me a cheap GPX stereo system. Despite the fact that it was a piece of junk from the bargain retailer Jamesway (remember Jamesway?), given by a self-proclaimed audiophile who had promised to get me something good, that stereo had a huge impact on my musical life. That year,…
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Homeschooled Jews Are Minority Within a Minority
‘I’m sorry,” the blond girl with the wide blue eyes said, “you’re going to go to hell.” She looked like she really was sorry. “I don’t believe in hell,” I said. “You don’t have to stay Jewish,” she said, “just because you are now.” It was 1997. I was 10 years old, and, like the…
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Jewish Genetic Diseases? There’s An App for That
Move aside Angry Birds. There’s a new “killer app” in the iTunes store. Released in July, the free app, called Gene Screen, offers insight into 28 recessive genetic diseases, 19 of which occur at higher frequencies among Ashkenazi Jews. The new program for iPhones and iPads comes complete with an interactive world map of disease…
The Latest
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Books The Greatest Jewish Basketball Team
Douglas Stark’s The SPHAS: The Life and Times of Basketball’s Greatest Jewish Team is now available. His 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: When I told friends and colleagues that…
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What Do John Boehner and an Ugly Root Vegetable Have in Common?
Writing in the August 4 issue of The New Republic, columnist Jonathan Chait, commenting on the debt-ceiling negotiations between President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner, said of the latter, “Perhaps he contracted a Washington version of Jerusalem Syndrome, succumbing to delusions of grandeur.” Since this is the first time I’ve seen the…
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Artist Uses Oreos To Show Value of Women’s Work
Carving mini-sculptures from the cream in the middle of Oreo cookies or turning eggs on toast into fine art are the best kind of challenges for Judith Klausner. The Jewish artist likes to transform everyday household items into works of art and, in the process, inject aesthetic meaning into women’s traditional chores. She hopes her…
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Books Just Like Comrade Karl Marx
Earlier this week, Michael Levy wrote about Jews and Chinese food and what Chinese people think about Jews. His 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: Central China is a strange…
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Zellig’s Disappearing Act
Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism By Robert Barsky The MIT Press, 320 pages, $29.95 Linguistics was a late arrival on the academic scene. Until the 1950s, few dedicated departments existed, but then the combination of Noam Chomsky’s revolutionary theory of generative grammar and Cold War subsidies ushered in an exceptional boom. Grammarians…
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August 19, 2011
100 Years Ago in The Forward Recently a group of hooligans perpetrated a pogrom on a group of Jews standing in the train station in the Catskills. Suddenly, as a few dozen Jews waited for a train on the platform in Fallsburg, N.Y., a yell was heard: “Death to the enemies! Death to the Jews!”…
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Hot, Sweet and Gay in D.C.
Sweet Like Sugar By Wayne Hoffman Kensington Books, 352 pages, $15 Benjamin “Benji” Steiner, protagonist of Wayne Hoffman’s “Sweet Like Sugar,” is a bundle of contradictions. He’s a proud Jew, but he’s alienated from Judaism. He can’t live without the city — in this case, Washington, D.C. — but he’s content to live and work…
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At the Heart of Self-Hatred
Since reading the front-page profile of Richard Falk in the July 29 issue of the Forward, I’ve been thinking about the phrase “Jewish self-hatred.” Falk, for those of you who missed the article, is a retired professor of international law who has pilloried Israel repeatedly in different places and capacities, among them that of a…
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