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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Bible Love
With All Thine Heart By Ilan Stavans with Mordecai Drache Rutgers University Press 2010, 21.95 MD: Why did you agree to delve into the Bible with me? IS: The Bible has been with me—or is it I who has been with the Bible?—since my early childhood. The biblical stories were ubiquitous in my Mexico City…
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Ruth Gruber 1911-2016 : A Charming Hostess and a Stickler for the Truth
Ruth Gruber, a ground-breaking journalist, woman of deep integrity and no-nonsense photographer who reported on Jewish rescues from Nazis as well as exiles in the Soviet Arctic died on November 17, aged 105. When most American reporters were stuck at home or needed a specialized photographer to make images, she doggedly bucked the trend taking…
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The Nigun Project: The Baal Shem Tov’s Nigun
I met Khaira Arby and her band, back in January of this year, at a rooftop party in Timbuktu, Mali where my band, The Sway Machinery, was en route to perform at the legendary Festival of the Desert. Arby, known as the “Nightingale of the Desert,” is a mainstay of the Festival and has been…
The Latest
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Books When Traveling in America Meant Trouble
Crossposted From Under The Fig Tree For centuries, taking to the road has been the stuff of grand adventure and equally grand literature. From Benjamin of Tudela’s 12th century “Book of Travels” to Jack Kerouac’s 1957 “On the Road,” travel has been bound up with freedom and an enhanced sense of self. But what if…
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A Select History of the Elect
The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election By Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $26 If the Torah is to be believed, divine election is a series of mounting responsibilities and burdens. When God first talks to Abram, it is to announce to this obscure, aging tribesman…
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Poetry
Goral bound for altar or cliff I’m at the mercy of You and Your lots Kapparos after swinging the briefly orbiting object stops to be eaten or spent realize that things don’t always revolve around you and resolve the universes between you and Him — Yossi Huttler Yossi Huttler is an assistant district attorney in…
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Jews’ Houses Ain’t Castles: They’re Shuls
Chuck Meyer of Ewing, N.J., writes to ask why a Jewish house of worship is known as a synagogue. The word “synagogue” is originally a Greek one first found in the New Testament. It comes from the verb synagein, “to bring together or gather,” and is a translation of the Hebrew bet-k’neset, “a house [or…
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The Sacred and the Profane
There Is No Other Jon Papernick Exile Editions, 184 pages, $17.95 A little girl on a kibbutz is born pregnant and believes that her baby will be the Messiah. A Haitian-Jewish student comes to school on Purim in Muslim garb… with a bomb strapped to his chest. An image of the Virgin Mary appears in…
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A Century of Recording and Making History
If you’ve never heard of Ruth Gruber, Bob Richman’s documentary “Ahead of Time: The Extraordinary Journey of Ruth Gruber,” will certainly enlighten you. But it might have been more accurate to subtitle the movie “The Journey of the Extraordinary Ruth Gruber,” because though accurate, the adjective is more apt for the woman who turns 99…
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Turning History’s Detritus Into Gold
Being a pioneering folklorist is no picnic. Even the groundbreaking anthologies “A Treasury of American Folklore” (1944) and “Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery” (1945), both compiled by Benjamin Botkin, met with ferocious resistance from academic folklorists, according to a new study from the University of Oklahoma Press, “America’s Folklorist: B.A. Botkin…
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The Egyptian Plumber and My ‘Eurabia’ Problem
The toilet in my Milan apartment hadn’t worked for weeks. Standing outside the entrance to the bathroom, I listened to the sounds of the plumber applying his tools, speaking in hushed Arabic to his assistant. My wife had let them in while I’d been out walking our dogs. Always indexing the languages spoken in our…
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