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
What Jews Can Learn From Christian Writer Reynolds Price
Durham, N.C. is not an easy place to be a non-conformist. It is the home of Duke University, notorious for its male lacrosse team’s behaving badly and its “Cameron Crazies,” obsessed basketball fans. Even in January 2011, when the Durham public schools need to make up a snow day, school is scheduled for Saturday, Jewish…
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The Escape Artist.
During his life, American modernist painter Philip Guston’s artistic styles ranged from 1930s social realism to 1950s–60s Abstract Expressionism to his deceptively simple-looking last style, which has often been reductively described as cartoonlike. Despite being written off by such high-profile critics as Robert Hughes and Hilton Kramer, Guston’s work has endured. And even though the…
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Books Mark Twain, “Mishpocha,” and Me
In her previous posts, Erika Dreifus blogged on her upcoming panel at AWP, “Beyond Bagels and Lox,” and the inspiration for “Quiet Americans.” 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…
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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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