Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Helen’s Head
In Eli Valley’s latest satirical comic, the Jewish community finds salvation in an unlikely source. 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 War,” appears monthly…
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Batsheva Dances, Challenging Gender — and Demonstrators
Men and women appear on different nights in the four dances of “Project 5” by the Israeli modern dance company Batsheva. Once again using Ohad Naharin’s distinctive choreography, Batsheva presents a series of powerful but mixed performances at New York’s Joyce Theater. But on a recent evening, audience members had to make it past a…
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The Most Important Nazi Film They Didn’t Let You See
More than six decades after its intended release, the documentary “Nuremberg” should have secured its own small but notable place in American film history. Funded, but later suppressed, by America’s government, the documentary records the first major trial involving crimes against humanity, and features then unseen footage taken by the Germans themselves. But despite its…
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Blessing a Building — Building a Blessing
The construction of a new synagogue is always an occasion for celebration, so it was with particular pomp that the Rhineland city of Mainz recently dedicated its new synagogue and Jewish community center. The dedication ceremonies, held September 3, featured an array of German politicians, including German President Christian Wulff. Many of them blessed the…
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One Image To Make Man and Woman?
Probably no section of the Bible has more exercised the interpretative powers of its readers than the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, with which we again begin the annual cycle of Torah readings on Simchat Torah — and, arguably, no two verses in these chapters have aroused more discussion over the ages than…
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October 8, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Strikes have become common events over the past few years, and all of us are used to the constant picket lines of knee pants makers, shirt waist makers, cloak makers and other garment industry workers. But in Philadelphia, an unusual strike took place in the Hevre Dorshei Tov Synagogue…
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Jews and the Booze
With the passage of the twin alcohol-friendly celebrations of Simchat Torah and the lesser known, but more suggestive, Festival of the Water Bearing, my thoughts turn to the seemingly contradictory relationship between Jews and booze. We’re a tribe that drinks, but we’re not drunks — so the story goes. That old gallon bottle of Manischewitz…
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A Room of Their Own
Are women-only spaces sexist, or are they progressive? In the cultural and political world, even in schools and religious institutions, the debate has grown over the past few years. Do venues such as art shows, magazines and blogs provide a much needed opportunity for women to communally examine their roles and identities in larger society?…
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This Side of the River Jordan
It’s obviously a losing battle, but I can’t help carrying on with the fight. Every time I see an item in the newspaper, like Jackson Diehl’s September 13 column on the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in The Washington Post, or Roger Cohen’s column on the same subject in the September 14 New York Times, I…
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A Boardwalk Empire of Their Own
Before Snooki ruled the Jersey Shore, Atlantic City’s reigning boss was Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. HBO’s new television series “Boardwalk Empire,” set in Atlantic City during Prohibition, draws on the true story of Nucky and his Irish, Italian and Jewish partners in crime. Ethnic and racial rivalries melted away in the bathtub stills so long as…
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It’s a Mad Mad MAD World
Al Jaffee’s Mad Life By Mary-Lou Weisman, illustrated by Al Jaffee It Books, 240 pages, $27.99 The biography “Al Jaffee’s Mad Life” couldn’t have a more apt title. Jaffee’s engaging tales of his mad, mad, mad childhood are even stranger than his long tenure as a cartoonist at Mad magazine. A journey through the Jewish…
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