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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Oath of Loyalty to What?
If Israel had Words of the Month, October’s would be “Jewish,” as in “a Jewish and democratic state,” or medina yehudit ve’demokratit, in Hebrew. This is what — if a controversial cabinet decision is adopted as law by the Knesset — anyone becoming an Israeli citizen will have to swear loyalty to. The many criticisms…
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Nicole Krauss’s Desk and Its Clutter
Great House By Nicole Krauss W.W. Norton & Company, 289 pages, $24.95 It is a great desk — an enormous, ornate escritoire equipped with 19 drawers — rather than a “Great House” that connects the characters in Nicole Krauss’s ambitious third novel, following “Man Walks Into a Room” (2002) and “The History of Love” (2008)….
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One Nation, Under Various Divinities
Listen to certain sections of the body politic today, and you get the impression that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were part-time — if not full-time — evangelicals. Not so, say s Marilyn Mellowes, who spent the better part of the past several years grappling with what she calls “the intersection of religion…
The Latest
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Steering Between God And Reason In America
Is America a “Christian” nation? Or is it a secular nation, subject to Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state? For many Americans, these are the central questions about the role of religion in public life. But the assumptions behind both questions reveal a certain ignorance. The story of America is not some fantasy…
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How America Came To Think ‘K’ Is OK
Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority By Sue Fishkoff Schocken, 384 pages, $27.95 Anyone who has ever spent time label gazing while at the supermarket has surely noticed the alphabet city of hekhshers — OU, OK, Kof-K, Star-K, KSA, cRc — staring back from a jar of…
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Books Polishing the Golden Rule
The story goes that a certain heathen approached the Jewish sage Shammai and asked to be converted, on the condition that he is taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Indignant at receiving such a ludicrous request, Shammai chased the man away. Undeterred, the heathen then approached the sage Hillel with the same…
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Books Wizardly Weaver Who Invented ‘Role Models’
The American sociologist Robert K. Merton, who died in 2003 at age 92, was a longtime fixture at Columbia University, where he invented such now-standard terms as “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy,” as well as the concept of a “focus group.” A thoughtful new study, out on September 14 from Columbia University Press, “Robert K….
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Judy Chicago Led the Way in Artistically Portraying Sexual Violence Against Women During the Holocaust
While walking through “Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism,” at the Jewish Museum in New York, one artist stood out for her intensity and, this fall, her visibility. In addition to “Shifting the Gaze,” groundbreaking feminist artist Judy Chicago has works in a one-woman show and in another group show in New York this fall,…
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Wearing Europe’s Tattoo
Foreign Bodies By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 272 pages, $26 Cynthia Ozick is one of America’s greatest living writers. What makes her work breathtaking is its unvarying subject, a single idea that encompasses all that marks American life, Jewish tradition and every other challenge to the world as it is: ambition. From ancient times,…
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Stealth Museum
Pan Pacific Park has long been an oasis in Los Angeles’s bustling, heavily Jewish Beverly-Fairfax neighborhood. Basketball courts, baseball diamonds, picnic areas and playgrounds predominate in the park’s hilly setting. It may strike certain visitors as somewhat incongruous, therefore, that the latest addition to the park is an institution that appears to run counter to…
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Move On Up (Toward Your Destination)
“When someone moved to Israel, we used to say he was ‘going on aliyah.’ Over the past 10 to 15 years, the phrase has changed to ‘He made aliyah.’ This doesn’t seem to make sense in either English or Hebrew. How did the change come about?” Over the past 20 to 25 years may be…
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