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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A Bubbling Font of Creativity
Despite its ubiquity, type design is easy to overlook; it’s the meaning of words that usually matters, not their appearance. But for Oded Ezer, an Israeli artist and type designer, typography lends a whole other life to language. In his work, which has appeared in museums and won design competitions worldwide, letters aren’t static symbols…
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July 31, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Tisha B’Av is typically a time when Jews go to cemeteries to remember their dead and to mourn the tragedy of the destroyed Temples in Jerusalem. It was no different this year, when some 5,000 Jews descended on Brooklyn’s Washington Cemetery. But as the mourners stood at their ancestors’…
The Latest
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Sex and the Shoah, Through Survivor and Sons
‘Death in Love” is both gross and engrossing. The 44-year-old New York-born director of “Remember the Titans,” Boaz Yakin, wrote, produced and directed this Holocaust-related film in a deliberately provocative way. This is the second time that the former yeshiva student has attempted a Jewish subject. “A Price Above Rubies” brought mixed reviews from critics…
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High-Tech and Haimish
Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America By Jeffrey Shandler New York University Press, 341 pages, $75.00. Recently, in pursuit of a story about Christians who have become interested in Judaism, I stumbled across QualityLifeNow, an outreach program organized by a pair of genial Lubavitcher Hasidim. Every Wednesday evening in midtown Manhattan, these…
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Stop Talking out of Your Nose
Shelly Jacobson writes: My husband grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family in Brooklyn. Recently, I used the word *fumfah, *thinking this meant someone who made a big or embarrassing error in speech. I didn’t think it was Yiddish — it was just a made-up word to me. But my husband says it definitely is Yiddish…
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Odessa
My father promises me That one day we will Flee the shtetl To Odessa. We will delight in Chocolate shoppes on Baroque squares. We will pass icon-laden Burnt-brown churches Topped by cerulean blue Onion domes. The harbor on the inland sea Filled with tall-masted frigates Will beckon like the Sirens. I will rise above the…
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Offbeat Israel: Sex Gum, Sports and the Separation Wall
Hamas has come up with some pretty bizarre conspiracy theories about Israel, but this one surpasses them all. Israel is bringing aphrodisiac chewing gum in to the Gaza Strip in order to corrupt its residents. Of course, encouraging Gazans to hook up and make more little Gazans is clearly an integral part of Israel’s strategy…
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A Horse! A Horse! My Horse for a Theater!
On cold winter New York nights in the late 1990s, Erez Ziv could be seen driving a horse-driven carriage and smiling as big as the moon. A rare Israeli among the otherwise Irish population, he excelled at the act he performed for tourists seeking romantic turns in the park or through Times Square. Regaling them…
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July 24, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Unemployed worker Harry Rosenthal was hungry and thought it would be easy to lie down in the street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and pretend he was dying of hunger. Police on Elizabeth Street bought his act and had him brought to the station, where he was fed and…
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Unstunned
Brooklyn’s community of Syrian Jews — defensive, insular, affluent and bound by a 75-year-old edict that forces excommunication upon anyone intermarrying — is a big and mysterious subject, one ripe for dramatizing. Zev Chafets’s excellent article about it, “The Sy Empire,” which ran in The New York Times Magazine in 2007, had odd and arresting…
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Einstein and Complex Analyses of Zionism
Judaism Does Not Equal Israel By Marc Ellis The New Press 232 pp. $24.95 Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East. By Fred Jerome. St. Martin’s Press. 334 pp. $25.95 ‘The Arabs have attacked us unexpectedly, wanted to destroy our settlement work, have murdered and plundered,” Chaim Weizmann wrote in…
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