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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Jewish Men Stand Up for Reproductive Rights
I was among some 6,000 reproductive-rights advocates who attended a rally for women’s health over the weekend to stand up for Planned Parenthood and a woman’s right to choose in the face of the most dangerous political assault on women’s rights we’ve seen in years. The signs in the crowd were witty, the long and…
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Jewish Themed Films Shine at Berlin Fest
The Berlin International Film Festival, which unspools in the German capital each February, is Europe’s largest film fest. This year’s installment, which ran from February 10 to 20, featured four Israeli productions and a number of films that dealt with Jewish issues, not including the Coen Brothers’ “True Grit,” which opened the festival with a…
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Books The World’s Mightiest Mortal Gets a New Lease on Life
We Jews like to pride ourselves on the many things we’ve invented: the ballpoint pen, blue jeans, and the atomic bomb, to name a few. (How about the theory of relativity — does that count?) We’ve also had a strong hand in shaping the world of modern entertainment, helping to build Hollywood, create the modern…
The Latest
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Honoring His People, By Design
Norman Gorbaty gestures at the dozens of his artworks lining the walls of the Walsh Gallery at Fairfield University. “The reason for this kind of stuff,” he says, referring to the Jewish-themed subject matter, “is there’s so many things I’m finding out in Judaism that I think Jews don’t know about.” Ironically, had it been…
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‘Lipstikka,’ Powder and Pain
The Israeli director Jonathan Sagall reclines in a futuristic white leather pod, drinking fancy herbal tea in a private lounge on the 24th floor of the Kollhoff Building at Potsdamer Platz. Down below, the film journalists, industry officials, actors and stargazers scramble like ants toward the various venues of the 61st Berlin International Film Festival,…
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Books In New Book, Grave Robbing and Other Stories of Poles’ Complicity
Jan Gross is once again forcing Poland to take a new look at its past. The Polish-American historian, whose previous books generated heated controversy and self-examination, has written a searing new indictment of Polish behavior toward Jews during World War II. “Golden Harvest,” a new book by Gross and his former wife, Irena Grudzinska-Gross, charges…
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Gurion Maccabee Explores the Akedah
The epic account of the “Gurionic War” from debut novelist Adam Levin was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards’ JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for fiction. Levin spoke to the Forward’s Allison Yarrow in November. In this excerpt the protagonist, Gurion, provides his own exegesis of the famous Akedah story whose impact is assessed…
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Dangerous Liaisons: Ofri Cnaani’s ‘The Sota Project’
It sounds like a bad joke: “What do you get if you put a kibbutznik in a stable?” The punch line, however, is anything but bad or, for that matter, a joke. For two years, the kibbutznik in question, Ofri Cnaani, has questioned the Talmud through the lens of contemporary art, and the result has…
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Bound for Social Contention
Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative By Yael S. Feldman Stanford University Press, 440 pages, $60 ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” So said William Faulkner in his “Requiem for a Nun.” If proof of this statement is needed, the history of Israel — where events thousands of years old…
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You Don’t Know Zubi!
Zubi!: The Real Hebrew You Were Never Taught in School By Danny Ben Israel, illustrated by Chris Murphy Plume, 160 pages, $13 Israelis barely speak Hebrew. The language on the streets, in cafes and along the beaches is a hybrid of adapted and adopted expressions mined from Arabic, English, Russian, Yiddish and dozens of dialects….
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How To Understand Yeshivish
Browsing on the Internet while working on last week’s column, which had to do with a blessing in the morning prayer, I came across the following: “The lechatchila time for shacharis is neitz. B’dieved, if a person davened from amud hashachar and onwards he is yotzei. In a shas hadchak he may daven from amud…
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