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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New Program Targets Persian Jewish Disorders
The United States recently got its first genetic screening program targeting a non-Ashkenazic Jewish community. On July 12, the Medical Genetics Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles launched its Persian Jewish Genetic Screening Program. The program kicked off with an afternoon of education and free screening at Sinai Temple, a local Conservative synagogue…
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Daughter Inspires Dad’s Quest for Cure
Dakota Jean Bihn started dropping things at age 3. That’s how Ohio accountant Ken Bihn begins telling the story of his daughter, a tale that has led him down the unexpected path of starting his own foundation. Dakota spent years bouncing between puzzled doctors. “She was clumsy, then she stuttered a little bit,” Bihn said….
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Shrink And Grow
With many shrinks away between now and the end of the summer, Susan Shapiro, the author of the new novel “Speed Shrinking” (St. Martin’s Press), suggests abandoned patients get their fill of talk therapy from these works of fiction: “Fear of Flying” By Erica Jong There’s a reason 20 million copies are in print. Jong’s…
The Latest
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Your Father Is Dead and My Pot Roast Is Ruined
There is a moment directly after a loved one’s death when thought and action cease. It’s an instant of dissociation from everything before the tragedy, and everything that will follow. The hit HBO television show “Six Feet Under” took advantage of that moment once a week for five seasons to educate viewers about death and…
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August 21, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward W An open letter from Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, also known as Mendele Moykher Sforem (Mendele the Bookseller), appeared recently in a Yiddish newspaper in Russia in which the great Yiddish writer charged New York’s Hebrew Publishing Company with reprinting his works without permission and without any compensation whatsoever. He…
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‘The Perfect Storm’ for Day Schools
As Jewish day schools prepare to open their doors for the 2009–10 school year, there is only one thing beyond the well-being of their students that is on the minds of those in charge: the economy. The recession “has been devastating,” said Marc Kramer, executive director of RAVSAK: The Jewish Community Day School Network, which…
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50 Years of Turning Out Doctors at Einstein
Leon Chameides was an undergraduate at Yeshiva University in the early 1950s, taking all the required courses so he could apply to medical school right after graduation. But he knew that his chances of getting in were slim because of the unwritten rule that he and all his pre-med classmates understood. “If you wanted to…
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The Pearl Project Picks Up the Story Where the Slain Reporter Left Off
For two years, journalism students at Georgetown University worked tirelessly to separate fact from fiction in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and to finish the story he was pursuing when Pakistani extremists kidnapped and murdered him. The Pearl Project, an in-depth graduate journalism seminar co-directed by former Pearl colleague and friend…
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A Classroom Film That Explores the Tensions Over Marriage in Israel
Israelis who plan to marry but don’t want their weddings performed by a government-approved Orthodox rabbi have an alternative: They can leave the country. “Ironically, this is the only democratic country in the world in which a Conservative rabbi cannot officiate a marriage according to the law,” Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, head of Jerusalem’s progressive synagogue…
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The Israel Teacher Corps Sends Young English Teachers to the Poorest Towns
Although visitors to Israel’s big cities see what appears to be a prosperous lifestyle, 40% of Israel’s children live below the poverty level, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel. Many of these underprivileged children live in the Negev region, where opportunities for a proper English education are sparse. While native English-speaking language teachers flock…
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Muslims and Jews: Fostering Respect, Bridging Cultural Differences
When a new venture at Columbia University brought together 30 Muslim and Jewish entrepreneurs from the United States, the United Kingdom and France for a cross-cultural dialogue, the focus was on something other than interfaith work. They talked business. Then, somewhere amid the conversations about best business practices and social entrepreneurship, the difficult issues of…
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