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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’18’ and Life — as an Arab-Israeli
Natan Dvir’s “18” is a photo-documentary project that focuses on the lives of 18-year-old Arab-Israelis. This is a pivotal age — one at which most Jewish Israelis join the Israel military, while most Arab Israelis do not. Divr’s exhibit — opening November 12, 2009, and on view through January 28, 2010 at Laurie M. Tisch Gallery at…
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Music The Lilith Fair Returns; Feminists Shrug
The 1990s era music festival Lilith Fair — like The Sisterhood’s fellow Jewish women’s magazine Lilith — derives its name from the Jewish medieval myth about the first woman on earth, exiled because of her refusal to submit to Adam’s rule. A nebulous character who shows up in various cultural myths, the Lilith figure has…
The Latest
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Talmud vs. Anna Akhmatova
Those thus inclined will be hearing Parshat Vayera in shul this shabbos. Among the big stories inhabiting the text, the tale of Lot’s wife is allotted but a single sentence. She turns around to look at Sodom, and becomes a pillar of salt. Midrash, which calls her Idit, provides different opinions about the events. One…
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Transforming the Y
Since taking over as executive director in 2007, Stephen Hazan Arnoff has looked to transform the 14th Street Y of the Educational Alliance both conceptually and physically. The first phase of the building renovation reflects the Y’s attempt to use art and design to enhance a sense of community. In this audio slideshow, Esther Sperber…
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November 13, 1989
100 Years Ago In the Forward When a taxi cab pulled up outside Max Shneier’s Suffolk Street Saloon, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at midnight, a few men got out and walked into the saloon with revolvers in hand and started shooting. The customers dove onto the floor and into corners, trying to avoid the…
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Against Israeli Anti-Mizrahism
Described by Gerald Jacobs in the London Telegraph as “an important document, which should be read by everyone worried about the Middle East,” Rachel Shabi’s “You Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands” is an impassioned argument against the neglect of the country’s Middle Eastern identity, evidenced by the…
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EnviroJews Avant La Lettre
When it comes to talk of sustainable agriculture and eco-Judaism, the history of American Jewry’s attempts to create an equally sustainable class of Jewish “agriculturists” has gotten lost in the shuffle. That’s a shame, because the story of how largely urban immigrants from Eastern Europe found themselves harvesting beans and cultivating chickens is a whopping…
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Squeezing the Cultural and Historical Juice Out of Love in ‘Jaffa’
The Other Israel Film Festival opens on November 12, kicking off its third year of the cinematic exploration of Arabs in Israel. Keren Yedaya’s “Jaffa,” making its New York premiere at the festival, shouldn’t be missed. As a film, it has its weaknesses. Fortunately, it isn’t simply a film; it’s an emotionally raw, and brutally…
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Brutally Frank
Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman By Stuart Weisberg University of Massachusetts Press, 544 pages, $29.95. ‘Get to the point, I’m very busy.” According to Stuart Weisberg’s “Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman,” that’s Congressman Barney Frank’s standard response to phone-chat pleasantries like “How are…
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A Loving March Back to His Father
My Father’s Bonus March By Adam Langer Random House, 240 pages, $26. Adam Langer and his father, Seymour, had what Langer describes as “a typical relationship between a Depression-era father and son.” His dad, he writes in his new memoir, “My Father’s Bonus March,” was “a man I respected and admired but around whom I…
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In a Familiar Hand
From Dennis Gottfried comes this query: “Since European Jews used the Hebrew alphabet to write Judeo-German or Yiddish, and Spanish Jews used it to write Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, I wonder whether other Jewish populations in the history of the Diaspora — ones speaking Persian or Arabic, for example — did the same thing.” They did….
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