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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Barbra Streisand’s brand-new duet with Bob Dylan is a whole lot different than you might think
Though Dylan and Streisand's voices may seem ill-suited to each other, the two complement each other gorgeously on 'The Very Thought of You'
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The Queer Queen of Comedy
‘Carol Leifer Gets Weirder: Now Jewish, Lesbian, and Vegan,” an online gossip headline blared after the comedian filmed a Web ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. While most of that line rings true — Leifer is Semitic, same-sex loving and vegan — “weird” is the last word that comes to mind for…
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Fallen From Grace to Gratuitous Hate
From Baltimore comes this query from Stanley Cohen: “In discussions in Israel of that country’s internal strife, one Hebrew phrase I’ve found constantly repeated is sin’at ḥinam, commonly translated as ‘baseless hatred.’ In this usage, what is the syntax and morphology of the word ḥinam? At first glance it looks like it might come from…
The Latest
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Remembering (Not) Remembering
We Remember With Reverence And Love: American Jews And The Myth Of Silence After The Holocaust, 1945-1962 By Hasia Diner New York University Press, 528 pages, $29.95. Hasia Diner is a historian who believes that things actually happened in history. She is also comprehensive, indeed dogged in her research, which her oeuvre amply demonstrates. Diner,…
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American Eccentrics
Homer and Langley Collyer became reluctant celebrities in the late 1930s when their decaying Harlem mansion began to attract the attention of neighbors and the press. Scions of an old New York family, the Collyer brothers had lived alone in the four-story brownstone since their mother’s death in the late ‘20s, leaving their home less…
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When American Judaism Was Yiddish
Yiddish Drashos and Writings By Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, edited by David E. Fishman Ktav Publishing House, 355 pages, $29.50. There was a time when American Jews of very different ideological perspectives would talk, and listen, to each other. One Sunday in 1949, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the leading Orthodox Talmudic scholar in America, addressed…
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The Pros and Cons of Air Power
Bert Horwitz writes from Asheville, N.C. “Could you explain the origin of the Yiddish word luftmentsh? How is it possible that by joining two common German words, *Luft *(air) and *Mensch *(man, human being), one gets a Yiddish but not a German word?” It is, of course, perfectly possible for two Germanic words to be…
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September 4, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward A letter we received from our correspondent in Galicia, Poland, details some unusual activity involving local Jews. First, he reports on an honest-to-goodness duel between two Jewish boys over a beautiful girl. Duels, which have long been popular methods of solving disputes, have never been particularly popular with Jews,…
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Moshav in the Himalayas
It takes just 50 rupees and a 10-minute auto-rickshaw ride to reach Tel Aviv from Lhasa. At least, that is, ‘mini-Tel Aviv,’ otherwise known as Dharamkot and Bhagsu, an Israeli backpacking mecca in the Dhauladhar mountains of Northern India. In Dharamsala, the de-facto capital of Tibetans in exile, maroon-robed chanting monks perform their daily routines…
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Latin Chutzpah
Tito Puente never had a bar mitzvah, but if he did, the celebration might have looked a little like the scene outside Lincoln Center on August 23, during the grand finale of the center’s summer Out of Doors festival. Despite the rain, the final concert of the series attracted a mixed group, as Arturo O’Farrill…
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Glorious Bastard
Quentin Tarantino is a director, writer and cinematic iconoclast known for works such as “Kill Bill” and “Pulp Fiction” that revel in non-linear plots and the portrayal of violence. His most recent film, “Inglourious Basterds,” takes the viewer on a bloody stroll through a fiction in which a band of Jewish-American soldiers is given free…
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Even a New Siddur Can’t Close ‘God Gap’
What can a new Hebrew-English Siddur do to solve the problems of prayer for modern Jews? It is no secret that the communal prayer experience of modern, socially integrated Jews in Western countries is deeply degraded. Rabbis and cantors work valiantly to engage congregants in worship with a sense of spiritual consciousness (kavanah) to little…
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