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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Wild Grass Grows High
Last Christmas, a group of very lapsed Jews gathered around a table of very treyf *Chinese food — in China, for good measure. Eventually, someone remembered that it was the fifth night of Hanukkah, too. Soon, a low-rent menorah punched out of sheet metal was produced from a battered Chabad box, and candles were lit….
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Tupac in Tehran
In the Land of the Ayatollahs Tupac Shakur Is King: Reflections from Iran and the Arab World By Shahzad Aziz Amal Press, 296 pages, $14.95. Albanian music is amazing. Still, in the spring of 2007, I bypassed racks of polyphonic folk and clarinet-led pop in a market cassette stall in Korce, Albania, to spend 2,000…
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Neurotic Parenting in America
American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland By Sam Apple Ballantine Books, 320 pages, $25.00 The symptoms of new parenthood are almost indistinguishable from those of psychosis: insomnia, depression, paranoia, mood swings. For those of us lucky enough to still have jobs, working and parenting also means moving seamlessly to diapers from…
The Latest
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What’s Working for Woody?
There is no talking about this Woody Allen movie without talking about Woody. But before I get into that, I’d rather assert how much I admire him — for his achievements, of course, and for how, at the relatively advanced age of 73, he is still making interesting movies. Like Philip Roth, his rough contemporary,…
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On the Trail of Deep Throat
Walter Askinas writes from Boynton Beach, Fla.: “My late father, born in Kovno Gubernya [the tsarist province of Kaunas in Lithuania], used to say about someone whose actions he deplored, ‘Er meg zakh shemn in vaytn haldz.’ I always understood exactly what he meant, but not the origin of the expression. Can you elucidate it?”…
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June 26, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward The streets of Jerusalem are full of fury, as it was discovered that the holy city has been dirtied by the publication of a new Yiddish newspaper. To make matters worse, Hebrew had just begun to get a foothold, and now this. The Hebraists are up in arms. What’s…
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Bringing Up Kids in America
Sam Apple is a modern journeyman who curiously encounters the world with pen in hand. First, he trailed a Yiddish-singing sheepherder through tiny villages in Austria to write “Schlepping Through the Alps.” Now, Apple tackles the bug-eyed wow of becoming a first-time father in his new memoir, “American Parent.” Allison Gaudet Yarrow: Who is the…
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Machal: Remembering Mickey Marcus
Filmmaker Mike Nedelman attends Colonel David “Mickey” Marcus’s memorial service and speaks to the veterans who fought alongside him in the war for Israel’s independence. Click play to watch these brave men recall the defining roles they played in Israel’s formation. This short video, the second in the series, is offered as a complement to…
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Excerpt: Sam Apple’s ‘American Parent’
Unlike most people writing about circumcision, I wasn’t especially interested in the medical debates surrounding the procedure. It was the strangeness of the ritual that captivated me. Plenty of the Jewish rituals sometimes feel odd in the context of my otherwise modern life, but no other ritual seemed as archaic or mysterious as circumcision. I…
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Head of the House
It may come as a surprise, but there are Jews in the U.S. military. Alison Buckholtz’s Navy pilot husband, Scott, is one of them. Buckholtz and her young children moved across the country to a town with no synagogue, few Jews, and soon no Scott – who would leave for a 7-month deployment. Her new…
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At a Loss for Words
The thought of losing words is terrifying for a critic like myself, or for any academic, for whom articulate expression of difficult ideas is the foundation of a life’s work. “Night Sky” a play about an astronomy professor suffering from aphasia, or the sudden loss of speech and language, plays out that fear with nightmarish…
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