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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The Nigun Project: Through the Castle at Night
For the Modzitzer Hasidim, the nigun played so central a role in the spiritual life that it nearly trumped the value of Torah learning in the eyes of the community. The great Modzitzer Rebbes were as much composers of nigunim and philosophers on the poetics of music, as they were men learned in the Talmud….
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Books Thrilling Hebrew Tales!: On Jewish Vampires, Golems, Tzaddiks and ‘HebrewPunk’
Lavie Tidhar’s most recent book, “An Occupation of Angels,” is now available. 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’ve got a feeling that, years from now, with many…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: ‘All-of-a-Kind Family’
In celebration of Jewish Book Month, The Arty Semite is partnering with the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA) and the Jewish Book Council to present “30 Days, 30 Texts,” a series of reflections by community leaders on the books that influenced their Jewish journeys. Today, Lisa Silverman writes about “All-of-a-Kind Family” by Sydney…
The Latest
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Books The Curious Case of the San Nicandro Converts
In a new book, “The Jews of San Nicandro,” author John Davis, the chair in Modern Italian History at the University of Connecticut, sheds light on the little-known but highly curious tale of how a community of Italian Catholic peasants came to embrace Judaism during the rise of Fascism and the Second World War. Using…
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WATCH: The Forward’s Exclusive Richard Dreyfuss Interview
Richard Dreyfuss is starring in the new off-Broadway play “Imagining Heschel,” in which the Oscar-winning actor plays Abraham Joshua Heschel — the renowned rabbi, theologian and civil rights activist. Dreyfuss recently visited the Forward studio, where he sat down with the Forward’s Dan Friedman. Video edited by Nadja Spiegelman
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Books Making Kosher Food Is an All-Night Affair
Earlier this week, Sue Fishkoff wrote about watching a goat get slaughtered and 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…
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A Close Look at the Bigotries of Reality TV
Jennifer Pozner’s new book, “Reality Bites Back,” is out this week. In its pages, she takes our favorite “guilty pleasure” genre of TV to task for racism, sexism and manipulation of its audience. Pozner spoke recently with The Sisterhood. Her satirical book trailer is below, and the interview follows. Sarah Seltzer: How did your interest…
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Books Our Rack: Yeshiva Girl YA; Bios of Bernhardt, Alcott
NON-FICTION In “Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt Robert Gottlieb,” Robert Gottlieb trims away the fat from the storied life of the legendary actress, who was born Jewish and who was later baptized a Roman Catholic. Gottlieb presents a peppy and concise biography rooted in facts and recorded accounts. The book, the debut title in…
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What Remains?
Photographer Yuri Dojc and filmmaker Katya Krausova recount their journey to document the last shards of Slovakian Jewry in the video below: The shattering of Jewish glass on November 9, 1938, did more than superficial property damage. As a government-sponsored pogrom at the heart of civilized Europe, it rocked the humanistic foundations of the industrial…
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Disparate Worlds
Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian Avi Steinberg Nan A. Talese. 24.95 Avi Steinberg’s memoir of his time as a prison librarian is a catalog of juxtapositions. The product of a suburban modern Orthodox community and a graduate of Harvard, Steinberg seems an unlikely candidate for a rough Boston prison, where…
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Italian Hilltop Conversion
The Jews of San Nicandro John Davis Yale University Press, 256 pages, $30 In a remote southern Italian town in the 1930s, a group of Catholics who had never before met any Jews began practicing their own idiosyncratic brand of Judaism. Helmed by a disabled and charismatic WWI veteran named Donato Manduzio, who fancied himself…
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