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
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…
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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…
The Latest
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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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Three Major Grant Makers Offer To Finance Digital Media Projects
The Jewish community is full of big ideas to foster Jewish culture and community online. Now, finding money to bring those innovations to life is about to get a little easier. Three major players on the Jewish philanthropic scene — the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Righteous Persons Foundation and The Charles & Lynn Schusterman Family…
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Jewish Geography, the Maine Way
Call it two degrees of separation. Jews with connections to the state of Maine journeyed in September to a lakefront home in Westchester County, N.Y. They came from around New York to meet and reminisce about this most northeasterly state. The co-host of the gathering, Anne Schneider, said if someone did not find a lost…
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