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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Red Devils
UTOPIA OR AUSCHWITZ: GERMANY’S 1968 GENERATION AND THE HOLOCAUST By Hans Kundnani Columbia University Press, 374 Pages, $27.50 One morning in November 1969, a homemade bomb was discovered inside a Berlin Jewish community center, only a day after the center hosted a commemoration of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms. At first glance, circumstances suggested neo-Nazis were…
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Don’t Throw Stones
THE GLASS ROOM By Simon Mawer Other Press, 405 pages, $14.95 A rich young couple hire a star architect to build them a dream house with a living room made of glass. High on newlywed bliss and the envy of their neighbors, they view their home as “a kind of perfection, the finest instrument for…
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Short Cuts Jaffa
From Australian animation (“Mary and Max”) to a restored print of 1935 Yiddish cinema (“Bar Mitzvah”), the 19th New York Jewish Film Festival is a veritable international smorgasbord of movies. Among the offerings, “Ajami” — also in sneak preview at the Boston Jewish Film Festival — is worth taking time to savor at the cinematic…
The Latest
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A Tree Grows in Zion
Forward reader Marvin Polonsky writes: “I sing in a Jewish chorus that is rehearsing some early Yiddish and Hebrew songs of the halutzim,* the first Zionist pioneers. In one of the Yiddish songs are the lines, **Got, got, groyser got,/Lomir davenen minkhe./Az yidn veln forn keyn eretz-yisroyl,/Vet zayn sosn vesimkhe. Lomir davenen minkhe seems to…
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A Book by Its Cover
I knew there were a lot of “Holocaust-related memoirs” but how oft-rehearsed the genre was I learned only when I added to it. Born in Vienna in 1938 and a fleeing infant refugee just seven months later, I am a prime example of a demographic that is determined to tell its story while it still…
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A Casanova of Causes
KOESTLER: THE LITERARY AND POLITICAL ODYSSEY OF A TWENTIETH-CENTURY SKEPTIC Michael Scammell Random House, 689 pages, $35 In 1925, Arthur Koestler, a 20-year-old Hungarian journalist, began to believe that politics was “above all futile” — and that there was “more truth” in philosophy. Zionism, he thought, was the field where he could get the most…
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Conflict and Compromise: Day School Parents Weigh In
Last year, I published an essay on MyJewishLearning.com called “Seize the Day School.” I worried about this essay. “Seize” spelled out, in great detail, my own ambivalences — note the plural — about sending my daughter to Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston. I feared that once the piece was published, her teachers might…
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Jewish Power Tools
I recall very clearly the afternoon in the early 1990s when the male eighth graders at the Jewish day school I attended learned about AIDS. Our physical education teacher, one of many Israelis imported to Toronto to staff the school, gathered us under the basketball nets in the gym and described the deadly disease. Then…
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A Tale of Trade-offs
‘Yes, Rabbi Wolf was gargantuan,” I tell my children. “A giant of a man, with more hair protruding from his knuckles than I had on my head, even back then when it was covered with thick curls. He was the one we were sent to for serious disciplining. But he wasn’t the mightiest rebbe in…
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Et Tu, Brute?
At least once a month, someone, usually a business acquaintance who doesn’t know much about my private life, will ask what my 14-year-old daughter is up to at her Hebrew day school, and then go on to let me know in no uncertain terms that I am a traitor to every aspect of the Yiddish…
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Jewish Farm School Gains Traction Among College Students
Rather than jet to tropical party capitals for spring break, about 105 Jewish college students are choosing to do something a little different during their time off. Some will be collecting maple sugar on the East Coast, while others will be working on organic farms in California. At the same time, they will learn about…
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