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
Is Buchenwald Survivor’s Israel Criticism ‘Abnormal’?
According to the Israeli government, the 93-year-old Buchenwald survivor is a liar. Decried by French embassy spokesperson Yaron Gamburg for spreading falsehoods about the Jewish state, Stéphane Hessel’s criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians apparently does not correspond with reality. “It is a literary fad which will have no affect on the real world,…
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Blue Jew, Gray Jew
Jews and the Civil War: A Reader Edited by Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn NYU Press, 448 pages, $45 Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag During Radical Reconstruction By Benjamin Ginsberg Johns Hopkins University Press, 240 pages, $50 This coming April marks 150 years since the outbreak of the American Civil War. The…
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Books Old and Grey and Only in the Way
Earlier this week, Michael Wex, author of “The Frumkiss Family Business,” wrote about writing about intermarriage and being the kvetch guy. 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…
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Living the American Ethos
Commissioned to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the American Jewish Archives and the 10th anniversary of Gary Zola as the AJA’s current executive director, “New Essays in American Jewish History” is testimony to the variety — and vitality — of scholarship in Jewish Studies. Like Jacob Rader Marcus, the eminent historian who…
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A Pacifist Leader Who Was More Prophet Than Politician
Judah Leib Magnes may just be the most important American Jewish leader you have never heard of. Born in Northern California in 1877, the baseball-loving Magnes was integral to the creation and development of nearly all major American Jewish organizations, from the American Jewish Committee to Hadassah. He was also one of the principal founders…
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Sympathy for the Dybbuk
Mort Reichek of Boynton Beach, Fla., asks about the origins of the word “dybbuk.” In Jewish folklore, of course, a dybbuk is the ghost or spirit of a dead person that enters a living one and takes possession of him, causing him to speak and act in irrational and unrecognizable ways. This is by no…
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The Problem of Spiritual Experience
I was at a Seder a few years ago, and told my host I’d just been on a six-week silent meditation retreat. Before I could finish my sentence, he announced, “You’re deluding yourself.” A bit quick to judge, perhaps, but if you ask most skeptics, I think they’d say the same thing about spiritual experiences….
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Look Out Broadway, Here They Come!
In the musical “Spamalot,” King Arthur wants to bring his troupe to Broadway, but is advised (in song) against it: In any great adventure That you don’t want to lose, Victory depends upon the people that you choose. So, listen, Arthur darling, closely to this news: We won’t succeed on Broadway, If you don’t have…
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January 14, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward Riots broke out in the Bronx and in the Brownsville and East New York sections of Brooklyn after Jewish women discovered that bread companies had tried to trick them into thinking that a new kashrut label on packages of bread was actually a union label. The people running the…
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Books Being the ‘Kvetch’ Guy
On Monday, Michael Wex wrote about the birth of his idea for his new novel “The Frumkiss Family Business.” 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: It’s nothing to…
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Moses and Anarchy
What are we to make of our biblical narratives? Jacques Derrida famously said that no comment on a text is ever innocent — that the act of exegesis means intervening in the text, asserting power over it and the reader. Such is the case with the legendary Judith Malina’s highly charged play, “Korach: The Biblical…
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