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
How to Sacrifice a Lamb and Other Important Information
For many Jews and non-Jews, American Jewish culture is defined by stereotypes such as the pushy mother, the shleppy father, chopped liver swans, too much food (“just in case…”) accountants, doctors, and holidays in the Catskills or Florida. But a new generation of Jews are so hip, Americanized and assimilated that they are not even…
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Lulu’s Back in Town
‘Mlle. God” opens with an aging painter named Melville wooing the sexually liberated Lulu. Annika Marks’s bravura performance channels the almost divine sensuality from Franz Wedekind’s “Lulu” plays and G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film “Pandora’s Box,” upon which Nick Kazan’s new work is loosely based. Unlike those dramas, though, the play’s goal is not simply sensual…
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Mind Your ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’
MEMOIR AND ESSAY By Michael Gottlieb Faux Press, 170 pages $16 Poets of the Language School (aka the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, tendency, faction or sociological phenomena — the occasionally rancorous debate continues) have risen to become the dominant avant-garde of modern American poetics. The first generation (including Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews, Lyn…
The Latest
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JDating — Without Losing Your Mind
In honor of Valentine’s Day, the Forward interviewed Michelle Cove, the editor of the online Jewish women’s magazine 614, the author of the new book “Seeking Happily Ever After: Navigating the Ups and Downs of Being Single Without Losing Your Mind (and Finding Lasting Love Along the Way),” and the director of a documentary of…
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Waking Up to Who You Are
From Alvin Hall of Myrtle Beach, S.C., comes this query: “One of the birkot ha-shachar, ‘the blessings of the dawn,’ that are recited every day in the morning service is “Barukh ata adonai eloheynu melekh ha’olam she’asani yisra’el,” the standard English translation of which is ‘Blessed are you O Lord our God, King of the…
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Books Tunisia, Whitesnake, and My Top Ten Favorite Jews of All Time
Michael David Lukas’s first book, “The Oracle of Stamboul,” is now available. 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: I’ve been thinking a lot these past few months about…
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Books On Women, Bylines and Bestsellers
Last month, The Sisterhood’s Elissa Strauss wrote post called “In Magazine Journalism, It’s Nowhere Near the End of Men,” using her own survey of magazines to show that male bylines still win out in terms of sheer numbers. And now there’s some serious research to back up her personal accounting. These numbers from VIDA, an…
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February 18, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward The bodies of two girls were found in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Both had been asphyxiated by gas. It is unknown how this tragedy transpired. The girls, 16-year-old cousins Clara and Toyve Gershovitch, shared a room in a boarding house. They had apparently gone to a…
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Of Gourmands and Rhinos
Was Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman guilty of an oxymoron when, in January, he labeled fellow right-wing Cabinet members who opposed his proposal to investigate the funding of leftist Israeli nongovernmental organizations “faynshmekerim v’karnafim” — that is, “feinshmeckers and rhinoceroses”? An oxymoron — from Greek oxys and moros, which mean not “oxen” and “morons,” but…
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Absorbing Art of an Expressionist Poet
Else Lasker-Schüler was one of the most influential literary figures in early 20th-century Berlin. She was known for her literary Stammtisch, or get-togethers, at the Café des Westens and for her bohemian ways. But it was her Expressionist poetry, with its penchant for exotic imagery and neologism, that made her famous. Here in Germany, more…
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Gay and Orthodox: And Cleaving Strongly to Both
In January, I went to a shabbaton with 140 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Orthodox Jews. Yes, Virginia, there are gay Orthodox Jews. There always have been. And while I have been working in the LGBT Jewish community for many years, I saw more courage, endurance and strength that weekend than I ever have before….
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