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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Excerpt: ‘Confessions of Noa Weber’
I didn’t look at him or at anyone else when I said: “Yes, I want to.” And the next thing he said was: “Okay, then let’s go and do it now, just tell me where to go.” At that moment he was a king, he was their prince, they admired him more than ever, and…
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Facing a Difficult Faith
Doing Jewish Theology: God, Torah & Israel in Modern Judaism By Rabbi Neil Gillman Jewish Lights Publishing, 304 pages, $24.99 Sacred Attunement By Michael Fishbane The University of Chicago Press, 246 pages, $30.00 On a recent Rosh Hashanah, one of our preschoolers stopped me in the hallway of the synagogue and asked me, point blank,…
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Yiddish Musical Theater From Italy, Pays New York a Call
As Moni Ovadia prepares to come to New York, we ask, “Why would several hundred elegant Italian theatergoers choose to spend New Year’s Eve at a one-man show about Jewish humor and angst?” Even as snow falls on Milan’s fabled Piccolo Teatro, the lobby is crowded with theatergoers queuing up for tickets. An answer can…
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Curating Jewish Culture in the Age of Electronic Reproducibility
Jewish liturgy prefaces a number of prayers with the phrase “Our God and God of our Ancestors,” which I have always taken to mean that there is a spirit of tradition of which it is the responsibility of each generation to make sense, and renew. For our generation, the challenge is to make Jewish culture…
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The Moving Forward, Mir Trogn Zikh Ariber?
Where were we? Ah, yes, tomatoes. Last week, I put off writing a column about the Yiddish word for them, *pomedorn, *in order to write one about *tfu, tfu, tfu *instead. This week, I promised you that I’d get back to them. But man plans and God laughs, as we say in Yiddish. Checking my…
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Leonard Cohen’s Ambiguous ‘Hallelujahs’
On February 19, famed Canadian Jewish singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, 74, will be performing his first New York concert in more than 15 years. Cohen’s song “Hallelujah,” rife with biblical imagery, has recently been revived for a new generation on such reality shows as “American Idol” and Britain’s “The X-Factor,” where young listeners refer to it…
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February 27, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward A man walked into the offices of the Forward and told us the following: “My name is Sam Engelman, and I come from Toronto, Canada. Every Sunday for the past two weeks, my picture has appeared in your Gallery of Disappeared Men. I felt very bad upon seeing my…
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Senior Center
Light here is old, suspended cloudy, from the cathedral ceiling, far above the somehow brighter sheen of its reflection on the checkered linoleum, on the backing and thick legs of the metal chairs around the bridge tables, the mah jong tables, the bingo tables— light stumbles, it seems, it gropes, not so much from the…
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Celebrated Collection of Hebrew Texts on View, on Sale
Jack Lunzer, whose private collection of more than 11,000 Hebrew books and manuscripts is on display at the New York auction house Sotheby’s until February 19, has a line he often repeats: “When two or three Jews get together, they buy a printing press.” The Valmadonna Trust Library, which is valued at more than $40…
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The Aesthetics of Violence Examined
Following the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was caught musing that the event was “the greatest work of art that is possible,” a statement that provoked widespread outrage and led to the cancellation of several concerts of his work. Though New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini, among others,…
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Eliran Scores a Stunner
Eliran Atar, his immense talent rescued from a life of petty crime, scores an amazing goal in the Israeli soccer league. Bnei Yehuda (in orange) are the gutsy underdogs from the wrong side of the tracks playing against Maccabi Netanya, the third-best team in the country — owned by the millionaire Daniel Jammer and coached…
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Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
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Fast Forward Tucker Carlson calls for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army
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Music ‘No matter what, I will always be a Jew.’ Billy Joel opens up about his family’s Holocaust history
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Opinion This German word explains Trump’s authoritarian impulses — and Hitler’s rise to power
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Opinion What Democrats fighting Trump should learn from Germany’s failure to stop Hitler
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Fast Forward 31st anniversary of AMIA bombing marked by ceremonies in Argentina, Israel and, for the first time, Congress
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Fast Forward Mike Huckabee to Israel: End hostile treatment of Christian allies
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Fast Forward Connie Francis, 20th-century star turned TikTok sensation, recorded an album of Jewish songs in 1960
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