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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Discovering Kafka and Rabbi Nachman
Arts and culture editor Dan Friedman interviewed award-winning poet and author Rodger Kamenetz, whose new book about his physical and spiritual pilgrimage, “Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka” (Schocken/Nextbook), charts a path between literature and religion. The Arty Semite is now featuring excerpts and reviews from Kamenetz’s Psalm 151 series. Dan Friedman….
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Books Getting Close to Your Food Is Harder When Meat Is Involved
On Monday, Sue Fishkoff wrote about people who only keep kosher on holidays. She is the author of “Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author…
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Books The Meaning of Money
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Many moons ago, when I was a graduate student in Jewish history happily spending my days doing little else but reading, one of the most intriguing books I encountered was not Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed,” or “Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrin” or, for that matter, Hannah Arendt’s “The…
The Latest
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Books Q&A: Author Michael Wex on the Jewish Comic Novel
Michael Wex is best known for his acerbic, authoritative books on Yiddish language and culture, but in this fall’s “The Frumkiss Family Business,” he has turned his attention to fiction. The sprawling novel is a farcical family saga, following three generations of a Jewish clan in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighborhood and questioning, in Wex’s characteristically…
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Forward 50, 2010
Economy Joseph Stiglitz Until 2000, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was a leading member of Washington?s policymaking establishment. But something happened: He became an acerbic critic of his former colleagues and even of the premises of modern capitalism ? a position he outlines in his latest book, ?Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of…
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New Language Meets New ‘Genius’
As early immigrants to what is now Israel were learning how to communicate in a revived ancient language, the hard-of-hearing among them were creating a new language altogether. Combining signs from most all of the different countries from which the Jewish populations emigrated, Israeli Sign Language began to take shape in the 1930s. Around the…
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Someone To Run With in Israel
It had to be one of the most moving reality TV moments. On September 4, seconds before 18-year-old Holon resident Diana Golbi was crowned winner of “Kokhav Nolad,” Israel’s version of “American Idol,” program makers revealed how she had started on the road to national stardom. They showed a clip of her making a visit,…
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Study Finds Jews Donate More to Poor
Jews make more donations than people of other religions to “basic needs” causes, which are those that focus on food, shelter and other fundamental necessities, according to a recent study comparing philanthropic patterns among Americans of different faiths. The study, by Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis economics professor Mark Ottoni Wilhelm, analyzed data that is…
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Living on Life’s Barest Edge
For the past 15 years, Sasha Chanoff has worked in refugee rescue, relief and resettlement operations in Africa and the United States. In 2004, he founded Mapendo International, a humanitarian organization that rescues and protects refugees in Africa who live in peril in war-torn communities. Despite the urgent needs of these people, in the past…
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From Sex.com to Clean and Green
Clean-tech entrepreneur and Jewish philanthropist Gary Kremen walked through his home in Los Altos Hills, Calif., on a recent afternoon. He held his 5-month-old son, Isaac, in one arm and gestured with the other arm to the environmentally friendly baby paraphernalia. Today, Kremen’s home is filled with diapers, bottles and teething rings. Not long ago,…
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When Kindness Counts, a Dinner To Say Thanks
The buffet dinner hummed with a festive air: plates of fragrant chicken; amiable chatter; little gifts of scented soap and candles, opened with unrestrained glee. But then things turned quiet, and serious, when Rivka Rita Ittleman stepped forward to thank her guests — “my angels.” Circling the room, she named the 20 women, one by…
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