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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The Four ‘Sons’ as Characters From ‘Glee’
On a Tuesday night in April, millions of people will gather together for the tale of four Jewish children, each of whom embodies contemporary Jewish consciousness in a different way. The evening is filled with song, multiple narratives and insights into Jewish identity. I’m talking, of course, about the award-winning Fox television series “Glee.” For…
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Jewcology: A Clearinghouse for Jewish Environmental Awareness
The website Jewcology.com launched late last year with guns blazing. A statement from 135 alt-Jewish heavyweights, from foundation executives to academics, supported its creation. A $50,000 grant from the Jerusalem-based ROI Community of Young Jewish Innovators funded its development. The global press trumpeted its debut. But the site, which calls itself a “transformational Web portal…
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Books Back in the Old Courtyard
Between 1929 and 1935, Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) published a comic novel called “The Zelmenyaners” serially in the Minsk-based Yiddish language monthly Shtern.The novel told the story of a family courtyard in Minsk, in Soviet Belorussia, which was being progressively transformed through aggressive Soviet modernization. As I will explain in an April 13 lecture…
The Latest
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Books Hebrew for the Internet Age
Crossposted from Haaretz “Writing on the Internet is like breathing or walking,” says Dr. Carmel Vaisman, who earned a Ph.D. from Hebrew University for her research on language, gender and play. “Hebrew Online” (Keter, in Hebrew), which Vaisman wrote with her colleague, Ilan Gonen, who is completing a thesis on the Aramaic of Kurdistan’s Jews,…
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Books As Jewish as a Hillel Sandwich
Austin Ratner‘s 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 Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: When I learned…
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For John Zorn, It’s Jewish Music as Bitches Brew
Is there a more vital Jewish composer than John Zorn right now? If there is, I don’t know who. Zorn’s amazing, postmodern, rockin’-swingin’-classical-noisy Masada Marathon, held March 30 at New York City Opera, was yet another stamp of mainstream approval for this 30-year fixture of the downtown New York music scene, who performed in his…
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Books Leaving Mother Moldova
Marina Blitshteyn is the author of the new poetry chapbook “Russian for Lovers.” In her earlier post, she wrote about the origin of Russian for Lovers and the poetry writing process. Her blog posts have been featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog…
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Books Excerpt: Terrorism and the Fotonovela
On the morning of July 18, 1994, the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of Argentina took place with the bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds. The investigation into the attack is ongoing. In his new fotonovela, “Once @ 9:53 am,” Forward contributing editor Ilan Stavans, along with…
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‘The Boarding House’
Originally published in Poland by Nisza Publishing House in 2009. Translated especially for the Forward by Tusia Dabrowska Prologue In the beginning, there were train tracks. In the greenery, between heaven and earth. With stations, like beads on a string, placed tightly so that even before the train managed to accelerate, it had to slow…
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Books David Bezmozgis and Me
Back in the early 1980s, the Russians were coming. Not the Cold Warriors, but the Jewish children, with names like Yana and Inna and Igor. Each child seemed impossibly pale — pale hair, pale eyes, pale skin, pale lips, pale hand clutching the hand of his or her mother, a woman, in contrast, impossibly bright…
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Books The Poetry Writing Process
Marina Blitshteyn is the author of the new poetry chapbook “Russian for Lovers.” In her earlier post, she wrote about the origin of Russian for Lovers. Her 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…
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