Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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What’s in a Name? Russian Jewish Composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg
A November 22nd recital by the noted Latvian-born cellist Yosif Feigelson at New York’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue is a welcome opportunity to experience the sinuously graceful and dramatic cello music of the Russian composer of Polish-Jewish origin, Mieczyslaw Weinberg. I once asked Weinberg’s colleague, the Russian Jewish conductor Rudolf Barshai, if the composer’s Judaism…
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The Amazing Jew: Salsa Legend Larry Harlow
Jews are drawn to Latin music, much as they are to Chinese food, by a combination of sensual pleasure and the liberation which comes from exoticism. Such is the conclusion to be drawn from the stellar career of salsa music performer and composer Larry Harlow (born Lawrence Ira Kahn in Brooklyn in 1939), who earned…
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A Self-Help Book for the Aspiring Philanthropist
The Art of Giving: Where the Soul Meets a Business Plan By Charles Bronfman and Jeffrey Solomon Jossey-Bass, 288 pages, $29.95. ‘The Art of Giving: Where the Soul Meets a Business Plan,” the new book penned by billionaire philanthropist Charles Bronfman, and the man who runs his foundation, Jeffrey Solomon, is something of a self-help…
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November 20, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward In front of her colleagues and a group of electronics experts, Dr. Louisa Rabinovitz performed an experiment that entailed electrocuting a rabbit and then bringing it back to life by sending another electrical charge through its body using a machine that the young doctor invented. The Edison Electric Company,…
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Philanthropic Young Jews Seek Same
Tara Lyn Gordon, the 26-year-old founder of Artists 4 Israel, says she averages three dates a week from the fundraisers she’s been attending for three years. “Last week [I had] five: two in the same day,” she said. Gordon goes to the fundraisers as a way both to network and to meet potential matches, and…
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Giving While Sick
This past January, Rochelle Shoretz had just celebrated her son’s bar mitzvah in Israel and returned home, when she had a routine MRI, necessary after she’d been successfully treated for Stage 2 breast cancer seven years earlier. She wasn’t particularly concerned about the scan, having already made it past the critical five-year mark with no…
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MacArthur ‘Genius’-Type Awards for California Teens
In advance of a trip that he took with his grandfather to Africa two years ago, Eric Feldman, 18, wanted to do something good. “I’ve always been raised not just to enjoy the beautiful sights, but to give back wherever you go,” he said. He was going to volunteer to serve food at a homeless…
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The Kosher Contender
Professional athletes lead interesting lives. Yuri Foreman’s life has been really interesting. Foreman was born in 1980 in the Soviet Union and started his boxing training at 7 years old. He kept it up when his family immigrated to Israel in 1991, eventually winning three national championships. To further his career, Foreman came to the…
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A Salute to Jewish Theater Producer Joseph Papp
The Brooklyn-born Jewish theatrical producer and director Joseph Papp (born Joseph Papirofsky) died of prostate cancer almost exactly eighteen years ago, and has never been more missed, as “Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told,” a new oral history from Doubleday Publishers, proves. The value of the book,…
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A Bauhausful of Antisemites
The 90th anniversary of the founding of Bauhaus movement in 1919 has led to a flurry of museum exhibits across Europe and a Berlin exhibit that is now at New York’s MoMA. The progressive Bauhaus artists, architects, and designers, led by German architect Walter Adolph Georg Gropius were shut down by the Nazis in 1933,…
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A Concerto for Ancient Hebrew Ram’s Horn
Composer Meira Warshauer has taken the shofar out of the synagogue and into the concert hall. Though she is not the first to use the shofar in a concert setting, her concerto for shofar/trombone soloist and orchestra, called “Tekeeyah (a call),” highlights the shofar’s range as an instrument, beyond its traditional ritual role. The concerto,…
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