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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Pornographic Stimulus Plan
The bearded receptionist wears a yarmulke. In any other office, this wouldn’t seem remarkable. But this is the midtown Manhattan headquarters of Lucas Entertainment, one of the largest gay adult film companies in the world. The yarmulke — worn in memory of a recently departed grandmother, it turns out — seems weirdly apt once you…
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Fusion Shmusion
With a multitude of workshops for musicians and Yiddish culture buffs, the annual KlezKanada Festival takes place at the end of August in the mountains north of Montreal. This year, I was able to sit in on Josh Dolgin’s “Fusion Shmusion” class, whose catalog description started with the question, “Does most Jewishy fusion music suck?”…
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Honor and Comfort
David Zinner is executive director of Kavod v’Nichum (Hebrew for “honor and comfort”), an organization that provides assistance in forming new burial societies, trains prospective burial society members, and identifies resources about Jewish bereavement practices for hevra kadisha groups and bereavement committees in synagogues and communities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Zinner is a co-founder…
The Latest
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How I’m Losing My Love For Israel
To paraphrase a recent Jewish organizational tagline, I’ve “hugged and wrestled with Israel” for 20 years now. At first, it was all embrace: Zionist songs and culture nourished me like mother’s milk, and on my first trip to Israel I kissed the tarmac at Ben Gurion, as did the other USY (United Synagogue Youth) kids….
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Surrounded By Angels
Thousands of souls crowd the large, airy space, their attention riveted to the actions of four women leaning over a gurney at the center of the hall. In silence, the women tenderly disrobe the body lying under a sheet. Their reverence for the task shows in the beauty and economy of their hand movements, in…
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The Shrine Whose Shape I Am
At first, Babylonian yeshivas of Sura and Pumpedisa were full of poets. Every wagging finger, every dipping thumb, belonged to a poet; the spittle of ferocious arguments was real poetry. As Shelley wrote: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” These Babylonian rabbis, composing Talmud and midrash, dreamed of legislating the myth; sensing the…
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Shalom Birdie: Charles Strouse’s Jewish Leitmotifs
The contributions of Jewish songwriters to Broadway musicals may seem overfamiliar, in part due to such distinguished examinations as Allen Forte’s “Listening to Classic American Popular Songs” (Yale University Press, 2001), itself something of a classic. Poet and editor David Lehman has just entered this crowded field with a highly personal new book, “A Fine…
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Fronting and Assimilating to a Gut Yontif
The onset of 5770 on Friday night September 18 posed a problem in Jewish etiquette. Normally, at the end of a kabbalat Shabbat, or Sabbath eve service, the members of the congregation turn to each other, shake hands (or hug and kiss, as is the custom in some synagogues in the United States today), and…
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September 25, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward The following is an excerpt from Moyshe Olgin’s review of Dovid Bergelson’s debut novel, “At the Station”: “Dovid Bergelson? Who’s ever heard of him? Suddenly and unexpectedly he appears with a new piece in the collective treasury of our literature. ‘A new book has appeared — an entire kingdom,…
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Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler and Dreyfus Collateral
The collateral damage of the Dreyfus Affair was far-reaching. The new release from Appian CDs of the complete recordings of elegant British pianist Harold Bauer recalls the most dramatic passage from Bauer’s memoirs, about how the famed Jewish American pianist Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler (1863-1927; born to an Orthodox family in Bielitz, Austrian Silesia), caused a…
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Music Jazz and a Schmear: Jewish Pianist Roberta Piket Shines.
Jazz fans have long noted the talented Brooklyn-born pianist/composer Roberta Piket, who, mentored by a fellow Brooklynite, eminent pianist Richard Aron “Richie” Beirach, performs with sophisticated emotional astuteness. Piket, who will be performing at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola from Sept 22-26, delights audiences with urbane charm, meditative sensitivity, and even humor, in…
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