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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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,…
The Latest
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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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November 27, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward Avrom Shulman, a resident of Bayonne, N.J., was arrested for running an illegal gambling casino in the basement of the Beys Yosef synagogue on West 20th Street in Bayonne. Shulman, who was being held on $500 bail, was arrested in the casino, along with more than 30 gamblers, all…
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Best of All Worlds: Tova sings Schaechter-Gottesman at Workman’s Circle
What happens when a pan-cultural jazz cabaret diva sings the songs of the first Yiddish poet to win a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship? Well Theresa Tova has been getting in some practice with the songs of the Forward’s good friend Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, so whatever happens should be of a high caliber. Find…
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Hakoah Vienna: 100 Years Old and Still Powering On
In Vienna, on the night of Saturday, November 7, the Sports Club Hakoah, also known as Hakoah Vienna, held a gala ball to celebrate its 100th anniversary. The evening’s entertainment included a bare-chested acrobat whose midair gyrations, on a swath of purple cloth hung from the ceiling, suggested both the precarious nature of Jews in…
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What’s in a Name? Russian Jewish Composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg
A November 22nd recital by the noted Latvian-born cellist Yosif Feigelson at New York’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue is a welcome opportunity to experience the sinuously graceful and dramatic cello music of the Russian composer of Polish-Jewish origin, Mieczyslaw Weinberg. I once asked Weinberg’s colleague, the Russian Jewish conductor Rudolf Barshai, if the composer’s Judaism…
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The Amazing Jew: Salsa Legend Larry Harlow
Jews are drawn to Latin music, much as they are to Chinese food, by a combination of sensual pleasure and the liberation which comes from exoticism. Such is the conclusion to be drawn from the stellar career of salsa music performer and composer Larry Harlow (born Lawrence Ira Kahn in Brooklyn in 1939), who earned…
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