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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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…
The Latest
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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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Music Bro-Mitzvah
There’s a serious debate in the African American community about whether or not to have a commitment ceremony for young men in order to give support and instill certain personal and communal responsibilities. This is not part of that debate.
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When Moses Saved the Man of Steel
For millennia, people came by their knowledge of Moses, the Ten Commandments, and Adam and Eve by reading the Bible and its commentaries. But since the 1940s, and well into our own day, comic books such as Dell Publishing Company’s 1957 “Moses and the Ten Commandments,” a brightly colored, exclamation-ridden account of the ancient biblical…
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Big Performances
An eager crowd took its seats high above the Suzanne Dellal Center’s plaza for the opening of the three-week festival Habama Hagdola — The Big Stage. Two majestic palm trees framed the large outdoor stage, and the center’s main building provided a picturesque backdrop. A glance around revealed the impressive scenery of the first century…
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Israel’s Invisible Neighbors, Filmed
Director Elia Suleiman’s new film, “The Time That Remains,” details Arab Israelis’ shattered dreams — and plays it for laughs. Suleiman is a Palestinian filmmaker whose personal take on being a foreigner on his own soil often tickles the funny bone while sparking political consciousness. “There is sometimes a pleasure to make a film under…
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Organs of Laughter and Bile
When Ian McEwan was quoted in a recent profile as saying that “most novels are boring,” he was responding to those who had pigeonholed his books as merely highbrow thrillers, and asserting the fundamental aspiration of all good books, literary or not: that they be interesting. As regards novels, McEwan’s judgment was spot-on. Most of…
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Calling the Faithful To Witness
‘I am a Christian,” President Obama declared in his June 4 address in Cairo, “but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan (sic) at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.” Although…
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