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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Constitution as Talmud
The Citizen’s Constitution: An Annotated Guide By Seth Lipsky Basic Books, 352 pages, $25.95 Seth Lipsky says that while he was writing his new book about the U.S. Constitution, one of his children suggested he design it like the Talmud, with text in the middle and commentary all around. The book he did write, “The…
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The Man Who Shaped 20,000 Penises
Philip Sherman has a good claim to have handled more foreskins than any man alive. And possibly more Jewish foreskins than anyone in history. He’s a Mohel who markets himself as a dependable cutter rather than someone who is going to make each bris memorable. Based in Manhattan, but prepared to hop from borough to…
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Israel’s Naked Truth
Documentary film is a sprawling, big tent of a genre. Any topic could, conceivably, be made into a documentary. But I’ll venture a semi-controversial opinion: It shouldn’t. What do I mean by that? Well, not everything is best said within the visual, dynamic medium of film. A good, if not great, documentary will intrigue and…
The Latest
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Transports of Jazz
A moment of auspicious transatlantic coincidence: while the Jewish Museum Berlin features an exhibit of jazz photography by two Jewish photographers, Francis Wolff and Jimmy Katz, New York’s Lincoln Center is showing “In the Best Possible Light: Herman Leonard’s Jazz,” featuring the work of another Jewish photographer who covered the same era, and shot many…
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Finding a Way Back to the Land of Granada
In 1992, 500 years after the country expelled them, Spain formally welcomed back the Jews. This is the premise for the new play “Granada,” produced by Polybe + Seats, which ran through November 22 at the Access Theater in New York. Playwright Avi Glickstein, whose family comes from Eastern Europe and whose father is a…
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The Maestro Business
Ever since conductors’ salaries began to resemble those of industry CEOs, it was only a matter of time before the worlds of music and business intertwined more incestuously. Printed reports inform us that the New York Philharmonic’s departing music director, Lorin Maazel, earned $2.8 million from that orchestra alone in 2006, and James Levine possibly…
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Spinoza vs. Maimonides, For the Future of Judaism
Maimonides, Spinoza and Us: Toward an Intellectually Vibrant Judaism By Rabbi Marc D. Angel Jewish Lights Publishing, 224 pages, $24.99. What does a 12th-century rabbi in Egypt, arguably the greatest thinker in Jewish history, have in common with a 17th-century Jewish philosopher in Amsterdam who was “expelled from the people of Israel” for “abominable heresies…
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A Green Note
In 1979 my parents bought me Kenneth Gatland’s “The Usborne Book of the Future.” It struck a note of cautious optimism about possible achievement despite potential pitfalls. Most stark was a page juxtaposing two images: at the top, a prosperous future with clear, tree-lined streets and suburban houses; at the bottom, a brown, murky dystopia…
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Did William Blake Know Hebrew?
Two of William Blake’s greatest patrons were clergymen in the Church of England, under whose rites he was christened, married and buried. But the British poet and artist did not attend church for the last 40 years of his life, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and he and his wife, Catherine, were registered as sympathizers at…
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Yiddish for Comrades
The week of Yom Kippur, you may recall, I published a column about a Yiddish letter, written by a young soldier in the Russian army to his family during World War I, that a reader asked me to decipher. In doing so, I pointed out that the letter writer, although his spelling was generally good,…
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December 11, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward On Manhattan’s East Side, 11th Street resident Israel Gleichman was in the Essex Market Court trying to prevent his 12-year-old son from going to jail. “Until he went to public school,” Gleichman pleaded, “my boy was all right. It was his friends from school who taught him how to…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish רבנישע כּתבֿים ווײַזן אומגעריכטע פֿאַרבינדונגען צווישן ייִדיש און לאַדינאָRabbinical texts reveal surprising links between Yiddish and Ladino
לויט אַ נײַ בוך פֿאָרשונגען האָבן טראַדיציאָנאַליסטן אין ביידע עדות געהאַלטן, אַז ייִדן מוזן אָפּהיטן זייער גערעדט לשון
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Opinion Why Poland’s president canceled his menorah lighting — and how the West helped make that happen
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Fast Forward 4 House Democrats introduce bill that would enact progressive vision for fighting antisemitism
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Yiddish אַ ייִדיש־רעדנדיק קינד דאַרף אַ „שטעטל“׃ ווי עלטערן קומען זיי אַנטקעגןIt takes a village to raise a child in Yiddish: How parents are doing it
מחוץ די חסידישע קרײַזן האָבן געוויסע עלטערן געשאַפֿן זייערע אייגענע ייִדיש־סבֿיבֿות
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