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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Commentary Quite Contrary
The Commentators’ Bible: The JPS Miqra’ot Gedolot — Leviticus Edited, translated and annotated by Michael Carasik Jewish Publication Society, 270 pages, $75 The act of exegesis is not an innocent or a neutral enterprise. Jacques Derrida taught us that exegesis means intervening in the text and asserting power over it, and thereby over the reader….
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Perplexed by the Guides?
I’m not one for magical thinking, but the way Kabbalah — the ancient tradition of Jewish mystical and esoteric wisdom — has evolved in our time does make me wonder. For centuries, Kabbalah was kept secret by a small elite of Jewish men. Its innovative theology and mind-scrambling puzzles were deemed too destabilizing for the…
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Modern Times
Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History By David B. Ruderman Princeton University Press, 336 pages, $35 When does modern Jewish history begin? The answer used to be simple. If your interests were social and political, the date was either 1782, when Emperor Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance granted a degree of emancipation to the…
The Latest
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The Lord’s Name In Vain
Although some of you have let me know that you enjoyed my recent column on the Orthodox spelling of “G-d,” others have chided me for it. ” photo-credit=”Image by WIKI COMMONS” src=”https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/675x/center/images/cropped/bosch-072210-1425717222.jpg”] Josh Sider, for instance, writes that my column was “in very poor taste” and that I owe my readers an apology. “You could…
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July 30, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward One hundred and six Jews, who were attempting to flee terrible conditions in Russia, drowned near Kherson Province when their steamship went up in flames and sank. Among the dead were many women and children. The steamer, Lovki, was packed with passengers, mostly Jewish emigrants. As it made its…
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Bassists Without Borders
Avant-garde art is often criticized for its complexity and self-indulgence, and for its disdain for matters beyond aesthetics. “Deep Tones for Peace,” an international musical project involving 13 high-profile bass players from around the world, might just be the most compelling argument yet against such criticism. The project, whose CD/DVD combo has just been made…
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The Interview: Unorthodox Desires
Miryam Kabakov, editor of a new essay collection about Orthodox lesbians,”Keep Your Wives Away From Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires,” visits the Forward podcast studio to discuss coming out to her traditional parents, visiting a lesbian in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of B’nai Brak, Israel, and how she believes gays and lesbians can find their place…
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First and Final Refusal
Sitting amid the clutter of his studio and standing in front of a blank brick wall, Boris Lurie has the look of a man who has experienced enormities. Balding and mustachioed with a heavy brow and deep-set eyes, his image appears in a series of 12 photographs taken in 1989. At the bottom of the…
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Love in the Time of Technology
Super Sad True Love Story By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 352 pages, $26 In his first two novels — his blini-wrapped Bildungsroman, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” and his highly absurdist “Absurdistan” — Gary Shteyngart coaxed his darkest humor out of imagined settings, alternate universes only one step removed from our own. It’s the satirist’s smartest…
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Core Connection
Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism By Shaul Kelner New York University Press, 304 pages, $35 Shaul Kelner’s book is auspiciously timed, with discussion still swirling about American Jewish attitudes toward Israel. While much is contested about Peter Beinart’s controversial essay, there is agreement that a sizable proportion of young people, especially…
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Al Pacino’s Pain
Al Pacino is channeling my accountant: the same stooped humpback; the same flailing, floppy arms; all the physical discomfort that implies a deeper, metaphysical discomfort with being in the world. A flapping sense that his only defense against the indignity of existence is the sterile mathematics of money. It’s the kind of performance you expect…
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