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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Novel Stance for a Serial Biographer
The Book of Job has inspired English-language masterworks from William Blake’s poetry to Muriel Spark’s novels “The Comforters” and “The Only Problem,” but France — especially Bible-resistant, post-Revolutionary and secular France — has lagged behind in such inspiration. Until now, that is. Pierre Assouline, a French-Jewish biographer, novelist and journalist born in Casablanca, Morocco, in…
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You Don’t Have To Be Dr. Dolittle
Translations of the Bible should refer to animals as “he” or “she” rather than as “it,” says PETA, an animal rights organization whose full name is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, according to the March 25 edition of the New York Daily News. Now that “the public recognizes that animals are feeling, intelligent…
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Books Swimming in the Sea of Haggadot
Image courtesy of Sanford Kearns Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree This year, or so it seems to me, the American Jewish community is awash in new editions of the haggadah, the age-old ritual text that structures the Passover seder. At one end of the spectrum, there’s the stunning Washington Haggadah, a facsimile edition of…
The Latest
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The Pope, the Jews and the Vatican Museums
In his new book, Pope Benedict XVI unequivocally states that not all the Jews in antiquity, and none of the Jews today, are to be held responsible for the death of Jesus. Although the statement is welcome, it breaks no new theological ground. Since the Vatican II council, the Roman Catholic Church has bravely and…
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Music Hip-Hop Violinist Miri Ben-Ari: A Role Model for Our Daughters
Miri Ben-Ari, the Israeli “hip-hop violinist” who has played with Jay-Z and Alicia Keys and who recently was honored by Michelle Obama at the White House this week, has single-handedly turned the violin into a cool instrument. It’s wonderful to have a glamorous female role model who has mastered music. While “Tiger Mother” Amy Chua…
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Books Righting Wrongs
Earlier this week, Austin Ratner wrote about Hillel sandwiches and patricide, photography, and Audrey Hepburn. His first book, “The Jump Artist,” is the winner of the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
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The Four Sons
Eli Valley draws the Four Sons expressing their views on how we in America might understand Egyptian freedom: Click on the thumbnail to the right for a larger version: Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His column, “Comics Rescued From a Burning Synagogue in Bialystok and Hidden in a Salt Mine Until After the…
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Four Questions for Poetry Month
As part of the Poetry Month celebration hosted by the Forward, we asked a number of poets about their practice. Today we’re featuring the highlights of the responses received. These are the highlights, but elsewhere on the Forward’s website, we’ve put the more detailed interview scripts. And, as part of its ongoing poem a day…
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Meet The Poets
Meet the poets who answered our Four Questions this Pesach: ADEENA KARASICK, an internationally acclaimed award-winning poet and media artist, is a professor of global literature at St. John’s University, in New York. MATTHUE ROTH’S poetry has appeared everywhere from Australian subways to HBO. He’s the co-creator of the animated Torah series at G-dcast.com. KAREN…
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Expanding Freedom in Today’s World
Nourish the Hungry By Ruth Messinger Whether we’re eating bread or matzo, legumes or leafy greens, our relationship to food is something more than 1 billion people around the world can’t imagine. Why? Because they are chronically hungry, enslaved to a global economy that prevents them from having the food they need to survive. The…
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The Kitniyot Question: What’s a Convert To Do?
The question of kitniyot presents an interesting challenge for the converted. Kitniyot — literally, “little things” — is the umbrella term used for the specific foods not eaten during Passover in the Ashkenazi tradition, including rice, corn, beans and lentils. It’s a practice whose origins are unclear; but what is clear is that this anti-legume…
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