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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More Than Words
If Passover is the holiday of questions and answers, Yom Kippur is often the holiday of confusion and befuddlement. Why? On Passover, symbols rich in texture and history are explicitly explained within the Seder ritual; indeed, explaining is part of the point. Yet on Yom Kippur, ostensibly the holiest of days, suddenly we’re left to…
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Lost in Transmission
Each month when I sit down to write my column, the relevant facts — the who, what, when, where and why of it all — are generally arrayed before me. Not this time: Loose ends rather than tidy conclusions are destined to be the fate of this particular column. I recently came into possession of…
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B’Sha’a Tovah!
Congratulations, we’re expecting! That’s because the Jewish year 5771 that has just started is a “pregnant year,” a shana me’uberet in Hebrew. (Ubar in Hebrew is a fetus or embryo.) In other words, it’s a leap year, one in which the 12 regular months, six of 29 days and six of 30, “give birth” to…
The Latest
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September 17, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward A tragedy occurred when a car hit 43-year-old Samuel Cohen on the corner of Delancey and Suffolk streets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Brought to the hospital, Cohen later died from his injuries. The police dispatched an officer to inform Cohen’s family, who lives at 49 Avenue D, of…
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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…
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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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