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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Performance Art From Behind the Iron Curtain
A new exhibit at The New York Public Library for the Performing Art — “Revolutionary Voices: Performing Arts in Central & Eastern Europe in the 1980s” — brings together a vast archive of documents that give texture and depth to the artistic climate of the Soviet Bloc in the 1980s. From scripts covered in censors’…
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Talmud for Today
The Talmud: A Selection Selected, translated and edited by Norman Solomon Penguin Classics, 896 pages, $16.00 By Lawrence Grossman The distinguished Penguin Classics imprint began in 1946 with a translation of “The Odyssey,” and it has published more than 1,300 titles since, under the motto: “The best books ever written.” The inclusion of a volume…
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Books Books Aren’t Born: Writing and Gestating Just Aren’t Comparable
My son, Shai, was born on January 21, 2007 and two days later, in time for our arrival home from the hospital, a heavy cardboard box arrived in the mail. University of Nebraska Press had sent me 20 copies of my first book, “Houses Of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books,” which I had been…
The Latest
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Darwin and God — for Kids
Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith By Deborah Heiligman Henry Holt and Co., 272 pages, $18.95 Children’s book author Deborah Heiligman has been interested in religion since she was a teenager, majoring in religious studies in college. “When you look at a people and its religion, you’re looking at sociology, psychology, history, anthropology,”…
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Iris Apfel: a Jewish Collector of Great Style
88-year-old Iris Barrel Apfel, born to a Jewish family in Astoria, Queens, has long inspired a fashion world in-crowd with her sharp eye for mixing and matching accessories in serendipitous, joyous ways. A inspired collector and shopper, not a designer, Apfel is being honored with a traveling exhibit of her fashion finds, “Rare Bird of…
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Pannonica
When was the last time music changed your life? Not just to the extent of humming Wagner in public, but to the extent of abandoning your family to rent a hotel room in New York and embrace the young, vulnerable and frankly dangerous world of bebop? That’s what happened in the late 1940s when Nica…
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Magen Tzedek: Model of the Jewish Future or Show Without an Audience?
The problem seems not to have changed. Back when I was at college, the egalitarian services couldn’t get a minyan, and so, while I didn’t like Orthodox liturgy, and didn’t approve of the mechitza (prayer barrier), I still schlepped up the extra flight of stairs to the traditional minyan, week after week. Whatever my personal…
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Mahmoud Darwish: If He Were Another
If I Were Another Poems by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages, $28.00. A River Dies of Thirst By Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham Archipelago Books, 168 pages, $16.00. Two summers ago, I dined at a Ramallah restaurant with a Fatah leader. I ordered Taibeh,…
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Internet: The Hatred Super-Highway
‘What’s the difference between Jews and Nazis? The Jews are guilty of the crimes they’re accused of.” The boldfaced quotes are real. They were written within the past few months by people who believe they are true. They are quotes from hateful blogs and Web sites — some written in America, some abroad. Antisemitism pulses,…
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How, Why, Who Hates Us
Varieties of Antisemitism: History, Ideology, Discourse Edited by Murray Baumgarten, Peter Kenez and Bruce Thompson University of Delaware Press, 248 pages, $75.00. Historian Victor Tcherikover used to say that there are few phenomena in history that have a history of 2,000 years. Antisemitism is one of those phenomena. The cultural antisemitism of the ancient world;…
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Standing Up and Leading the Way
Sybil Terres Gilmar writes from Philadelphia: “Recently, as part of my work as a docent at Mikveh Israel, the oldest continuous congregation in Philadelphia (since 1740), I came across the word ‘duchening’ in conjunction with an early 19th-century chair adorned with hands indicating the priestly blessing. In trying to research the origin of the word,…
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