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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A Utopian Bronx Tale
In the mid-1920s, a group of immigrant Jewish factory workers decided that they’d come this far for something better than the slums they inhabited. So pooling resources, they orchestrated the construction of four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx, with practical goals for a better quality of life, and idealistic visions of…
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LABA and the Ripple Effect
As an eclectic roster of Jewish artists takes the stage at a new multimedia festival in early May, a bold new experiment aimed at transforming how Jewish communities connect with culture (and culture makers) will also enter the spotlight. From “absurdist rock cabaret” to giant sculptures to a “contact improvisation” workshop cheekily called “The Meating,”…
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Sunny Side Down
Sunnyside By Glen David Gold Knopf, 576 pages, $26.95. Perhaps you’ll know where I am going with this review if I begin by saying that Glen David Gold’s last book was splendid. So many fiction writers begin small, writing about what they know, etching a fine portrait of a particular and familiar time and place,…
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An Israeli, a German and a Palestinian Walk Into a Theater…
A strange three-act drama is played out here in Germany with unsettling regularity. Some public figure — usually a politician — will make a comparison between the present-day and Nazi Germany. I’ll grab the first example that comes to mind. Last year, a week before the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a well-known German economist from…
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Roee Chen: Enigma, Director
How does a Sephardic Jew whose father’s family has lived in Israel since the Spanish Inquisition come to translate and adapt the quintessentially Ashkenazic Isaac Bashevis Singer for the originally Russian-speaking Jaffa-based Gesher Theatre? According to Roee Chen, it’s done by pretending to be someone you aren’t. “I was 19 and needed a job,” Chen…
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Saving the World, One Jew at a Time
Spiritual Activism: A Jewish Guide to Leadership and Repairing the World By Rabbi Avraham Weiss Jewish Lights Publishing, 224 pages, $24.99. Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. & the Jewish Community By Rabbi Marc Schneier Jewish Lights Publishing, 240 pages, $18.99. As a rabbi who has devoted her career to social and economic justice, I…
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Shabbos Goy a la Mode
Not being a very ritually observant Jew, I needed the Home & Garden section of the April 9 New York Times, to which my attention was called by my wife, to teach me a new Jewish term I didnt know. This is “Sabbath mode,” and it has been around, so I subsequently learned, since 1997,…
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May 1, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward An unusual blood-libel report has reached us from Brisk, Russian-ruled Poland, where a local tailor had taken in a Christian man as a boarder. Apparently, the young Christian initiated a love affair with the tailor’s wife, and when the tailor found out about it, he arranged for three butcher…
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Awaiting Rapture
By Gwen Orel Deborah Zoe Laufer’s play “End Days,” which received an American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg citation, has already been staged nine times this year — including an ongoing production in Salt Lake City — and will open in Atlanta next month, and outside Philadelphia over the summer. In “End Days,” a Jewish mother…
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New Life for Arthur Szyk
“An artist, especially a Jewish artist, cannot remain neutral in these times. He cannot escape to still lifes, abstractions and experiments.” These words, uttered in 1934, belong to Polish-Jewish illustrator and political caricaturist Arthur Szyk (1894–1951). As one of World War II’s most widely circulated propagandists, he fought the National Socialist regime and the Axis…
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Offbeat Israel: A YouTube Mashup Sensation
The stars of the videos mostly live thousands of miles away from each other. They have never met one another or the producer — and they haven’t even been told they would be making an appearance. This is “Thru You,” a quirky homemade creation of 26-year-old Israeli Ophir Kutiel and the latest sensation on YouTube. It…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
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