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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‘The Perfect Storm’ for Day Schools
As Jewish day schools prepare to open their doors for the 2009–10 school year, there is only one thing beyond the well-being of their students that is on the minds of those in charge: the economy. The recession “has been devastating,” said Marc Kramer, executive director of RAVSAK: The Jewish Community Day School Network, which…
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50 Years of Turning Out Doctors at Einstein
Leon Chameides was an undergraduate at Yeshiva University in the early 1950s, taking all the required courses so he could apply to medical school right after graduation. But he knew that his chances of getting in were slim because of the unwritten rule that he and all his pre-med classmates understood. “If you wanted to…
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The Pearl Project Picks Up the Story Where the Slain Reporter Left Off
For two years, journalism students at Georgetown University worked tirelessly to separate fact from fiction in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and to finish the story he was pursuing when Pakistani extremists kidnapped and murdered him. The Pearl Project, an in-depth graduate journalism seminar co-directed by former Pearl colleague and friend…
The Latest
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A Classroom Film That Explores the Tensions Over Marriage in Israel
Israelis who plan to marry but don’t want their weddings performed by a government-approved Orthodox rabbi have an alternative: They can leave the country. “Ironically, this is the only democratic country in the world in which a Conservative rabbi cannot officiate a marriage according to the law,” Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, head of Jerusalem’s progressive synagogue…
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The Israel Teacher Corps Sends Young English Teachers to the Poorest Towns
Although visitors to Israel’s big cities see what appears to be a prosperous lifestyle, 40% of Israel’s children live below the poverty level, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel. Many of these underprivileged children live in the Negev region, where opportunities for a proper English education are sparse. While native English-speaking language teachers flock…
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Muslims and Jews: Fostering Respect, Bridging Cultural Differences
When a new venture at Columbia University brought together 30 Muslim and Jewish entrepreneurs from the United States, the United Kingdom and France for a cross-cultural dialogue, the focus was on something other than interfaith work. They talked business. Then, somewhere amid the conversations about best business practices and social entrepreneurship, the difficult issues of…
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Students Create Their Own Charity
For many Jewish children, the idea of charity often means dropping change into a bright-blue tzedakah box. Sure, the collected money goes to charitable organizations, but how do you measure whether the kids’ own efforts have any noticeable effect? Now, one group of students is getting the opportunity to see its money at work. During…
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At Davennen’ Leadership Institute, A Chance To Deepen Spiritual Experience
Ask Rabbi Marcia Prager what a typical day at the Davennen’ Leadership Training Institute is like, and she won’t talk about the master classes, the skills sessions, the group work. Not at first. At first, she’ll start at the beginning. “We wake up as the sun is getting up, molding our lives within the prayerful…
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‘Names, Not Numbers’: Listening to the Stories Told by Holocaust Survivors
Tova Rosenberg knows about stories. Sitting in her Yeshiva University office in New York City’s Washington Heights, the creator of the Holocaust education project “Names, Not Numbers” recounted a student’s interview with the son of a Holocaust survivor. The son recalled asking his father, “Why do you survivors have all these stories?” And the father…
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View From a Bridge of Posterity
Arthur Miller: 1915–1962 By Christopher Bigsby Harvard University Press, 776 pages, $35.00. Arthur Miller is, by any measure, the most eminent and the most acclaimed Jewish playwright the world has ever seen. Most people who know his name probably would accept his greatness as a given. Yet he has been attacked vigorously: for his left-wing…
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Self-Righteous Gentiles
In the vast graveyard that is Europe, there lies a sacred plot reserved for the Weimar Republic — Germany’s bright but stillborn sanctuary for liberalism, libertinism and a host of other projected freedoms. Idealized, treated more often as an allegory than as a historical event, and celebrated as much for its exiles as for its…
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