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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Books
For the Love of Books
Just several feet away from where people are immersed in the digital worlds of their laptops, iPhones, and Kindles, Ido Agassi’s hand-designed, individually printed and bound books calmly look on from a display case in the lobby of the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto, California. Those who take time to observe Agassi’s “Books as…
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Man of the People of the Book
Christianity in the English-speaking world changed forever 400 years ago. With the release of the authorized version of the King James Bible in English, Scripture became radically more approachable. As Christians recently began celebrating the anniversary of this text, in Jerusalem a quirky, secular-born Orthodox rabbi completed a translation project of similar magnitude for Jews…
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A Matter of Life and Death
Considering the firestorm around last year’s “Dead Sea Scrolls” exhibit — the Palestinian Authority demanded its cancellation, claiming Israel had “stolen” the artifacts — it’s understandable that Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum might tread lightly around Middle East politics. But the ROM’s new megashow, “Water: The Exhibition,” opens at a time when thorny policy challenges around…
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Books Reimagining the Talmud
Earlier this week, Aaron Roller, an editor of Mima’amakim, wrote about the Jewish Austin Powers and the Jewish poetry conspiracy. 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: I knew…
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Film & TV Hollywood’s Women Problem
While we have been busy looking at women in magazines, Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University has been tracking the rather sluggish growth of women in Hollywood. The Center just released its annual report, “The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of…
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March 11th, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward A sensational drama is occurring right now in Warsaw’s Yiddish theater — and it’s not onstage. Two major founders of Yiddish theater, a husband-and-wife team that is considered to be in the top tier of Yiddish actors, are currently embroiled in a scandal so intense that Warsaw’s Yiddish papers…
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Books Samuel Thrope: International Historian of Mystery
On Monday, Aaron Roller, an editor of Mima’amakim, wrote about the Jewish poetry conspiracy. 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: Of all the poets whose work I’ve come…
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Wanted: A Gospel Worth Following
The Gospel of Anarchy By Justin Taylor Harper Perennial, 256 pages, $13.99 For many, college is a first sip of freedom, but for the characters in Justin Taylor’s debut novel, college is an incarnation of the evil machine against which they were born to rebel. “The Gospel of Anarchy,” is set in the inland swamp…
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Wonders Of America
Many American Jews are nothing if not zealous in their belief in the separation of church and state. One might even say it is among the cardinal principles of their faith. For a large swath of the American Jewish community, the best of all possible worlds is one in which religion stays in one corner…
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Buildings That Jump Up And Bite
Modern architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier are notorious for having fixed, even tyrannical, ideas of how people should experience the buildings they designed — sometimes seemingly for maximum discomfort. Breaking with this precedent, architect Morris Lapidus, born in Odessa to an Orthodox Jewish family in 1902, designed buildings to make people…
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A Truffle, and 10 Words for ‘Potato’
Irving Zlotnik writes: “There seem to be two commonly used words for the potato in Yiddish, kartofl and bulbe. I know the first comes from German Kartoffel, but where does bulbe come from?” Although different regions of Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe had different words for potatoes — among them, according to Nahum Stutchkoff’s “Thesaurus of the…
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