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 Right To Return to a Home
When Washington, D.C.’s Theater J announced that its season featured a play based on a story from a Palestinian author with ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, it raised hackles within segments of the D.C. metropolitan Jewish community. The work, “Return to Haifa,” arrived from Tel Aviv on January 15 for…
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Portrait of the Writer as a Young Painter
In 2007, I conducted a highly unscientific poll of Israeli readers. I was in the Jewish state on a research fellowship, but official business soon gave way to much unofficial business, which included long conversations about Hebrew culture over large amounts of excellent coffee. My poll consisted of a single question: Who is your favorite…
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A Year of Revolutionary Nigunim
The nigun, a wordless spiritual folk melody, is one of the great achievements of Jewish aesthetic expression. I grew up hearing nigunim at the family table on the Sabbath and holidays with my grandfather and my cousins. We sang a continuous stream of melodies, one flowing into the next, for what felt like hours. As…
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Elephants of Khartoum
Zvi Rabbie writes from Los Gatos, Calif., to ask: “With the impending partition of Sudan in the news lately, it would be interesting if you could address the multiple uses of the Hebrew word ḥartom. Besides resembling Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, it’s the word used in the Book of Exodus for Pharaoh’s magicians, while it also…
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Books A Birthday and an Anniversary: A Book and Its Inspiration
On Monday, Erika Dreifus, the author of “Quiet Americans,” wrote about Jewish-American Literature as Multicultural Literature. 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 the series, please visit: Today is a special day: It’s…
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January 28, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward The Forverts has received an unsigned letter from a local man who claims he will commit suicide on January 26. We are printing the letter in hopes that friends or relatives will bring this man to his senses. He says that he has written the letter as a type…
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Books Canada Remembers Holocaust Role With Daniel Libeskind Monument
Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Wheel of Conscience’ in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Courtesy Canadian Jewish Congress. The ill-fated voyage of the MS St. Louis, the Hamburg-based ocean liner intended to transport 907 mostly German Jewish refugees to Cuba in May 1939, has always played a central role in early Holocaust history, and not only because it unraveled, tragically,…
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Judith Plaskow is Still Standing, Twenty Years On
It has been 20 years since Judith Plaskow published the first-ever book of Jewish-feminist theology, “Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism From a Feminist Perspective.” Much about Jewish life and practice has changed since then. But, Plaskow says, not enough. In “Standing,” she looked back at a watershed moment in her life as a Jew and…
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Not Just the King’s Speech
Phil Schneider is fully aware that his most recent film, “Going With the Flow,” might disappoint some viewers. First, unlike Oscar-hopeful “The King’s Speech,” it portrays no royalty. Second, and more substantial, as an award-winning Jewish speech therapist who has worked in the industry for more than 40 years, Schneider knows that some people will…
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Books Jewish-American Literature as Multicultural Literature
Erika Dreifus‘s first book, “Quiet Americans,” will be published on January 19th. 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 the series, please visit: Early next month, four other writers — Andrew Furman, Kevin…
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Taking on the Rabbinate — on YouTube
Vered Shavit did everything she could to avoid the Israeli rabbinate. When she got married in 2005, she flew all the way to Cyprus for a civil ceremony, then had a Reform ceremony in Israel and never registered in Israel as married. But it didn’t matter. Despite everything, when she and the man decided this…
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