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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Books
Polishing the Golden Rule
The story goes that a certain heathen approached the Jewish sage Shammai and asked to be converted, on the condition that he is taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Indignant at receiving such a ludicrous request, Shammai chased the man away. Undeterred, the heathen then approached the sage Hillel with the same…
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Books Wizardly Weaver Who Invented ‘Role Models’
The American sociologist Robert K. Merton, who died in 2003 at age 92, was a longtime fixture at Columbia University, where he invented such now-standard terms as “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy,” as well as the concept of a “focus group.” A thoughtful new study, out on September 14 from Columbia University Press, “Robert K….
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Judy Chicago Led the Way in Artistically Portraying Sexual Violence Against Women During the Holocaust
While walking through “Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism,” at the Jewish Museum in New York, one artist stood out for her intensity and, this fall, her visibility. In addition to “Shifting the Gaze,” groundbreaking feminist artist Judy Chicago has works in a one-woman show and in another group show in New York this fall,…
The Latest
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Wearing Europe’s Tattoo
Foreign Bodies By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 272 pages, $26 Cynthia Ozick is one of America’s greatest living writers. What makes her work breathtaking is its unvarying subject, a single idea that encompasses all that marks American life, Jewish tradition and every other challenge to the world as it is: ambition. From ancient times,…
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Stealth Museum
Pan Pacific Park has long been an oasis in Los Angeles’s bustling, heavily Jewish Beverly-Fairfax neighborhood. Basketball courts, baseball diamonds, picnic areas and playgrounds predominate in the park’s hilly setting. It may strike certain visitors as somewhat incongruous, therefore, that the latest addition to the park is an institution that appears to run counter to…
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Move On Up (Toward Your Destination)
“When someone moved to Israel, we used to say he was ‘going on aliyah.’ Over the past 10 to 15 years, the phrase has changed to ‘He made aliyah.’ This doesn’t seem to make sense in either English or Hebrew. How did the change come about?” Over the past 20 to 25 years may be…
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Shedding Grim Light
The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans By Mark Jacobson Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $26 In this podcast, Jon Kalish speaks with Mark Jacobson, author of ‘The Lampshade.’: Why are people so reluctant to publish a photograph of Mark Jacobson’s lampshade? Because the lampshade is almost certainly made of human…
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Marching Toward Obscenity
Some years ago, on an overcast spring morning, I visited Majdanek, the Nazi concentration camp near Lublin, Poland. I recall many disturbing sights from that day — the gas chamber, the barracks, the monumental concrete bowl containing tons of human ash. But one unnerving sight was more about the living: the teenagers who had wrapped…
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The Gate and The Gatekeepers: Kamenetz, Kafka and Reb Nachman
Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka By Rodger Kamenetz Schocken/Nextbook, 384 pages, $25. In “Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka,” Rodger Kamenetz has set for himself the ambitious task of bringing about a meeting of sorts between two great men who lived 100 years and hundreds of miles apart….
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Mexican Jews in the Land of Death
One might think, since two of the more or less half dozen Jewish-themed Mexican films are about a wake, that the Mexican-Jewish community of about 35,000 is obsessed with death. And indeed, it might well be. After all, Mexico’s fascination with death is ubiquitous, from the Aztec ritual of sacrificing virgins to the gods at…
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Who’s That Guy in the Black Hat Next to Cuomo?
Only one ultra-Orthodox fixer appears to have accompanied New York gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Cuomo on all four of his early October visits to Brooklyn’s Hasidic rebbes. A YouTube video (see below) shows the man, wearing the fedora typical of the non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox, sitting diagonal to Cuomo in a meeting with Rabbi Zalman Leib Teitelbaum, one…
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Fast Forward Two congregations, two opinions as Torahs hit the floor at separate NYC services
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Fast Forward Australia accuses Iran of directing antisemitic attacks, expels ambassador
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