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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Students Create Their Own Charity
For many Jewish children, the idea of charity often means dropping change into a bright-blue tzedakah box. Sure, the collected money goes to charitable organizations, but how do you measure whether the kids’ own efforts have any noticeable effect? Now, one group of students is getting the opportunity to see its money at work. During…
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At Davennen’ Leadership Institute, A Chance To Deepen Spiritual Experience
Ask Rabbi Marcia Prager what a typical day at the Davennen’ Leadership Training Institute is like, and she won’t talk about the master classes, the skills sessions, the group work. Not at first. At first, she’ll start at the beginning. “We wake up as the sun is getting up, molding our lives within the prayerful…
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‘Names, Not Numbers’: Listening to the Stories Told by Holocaust Survivors
Tova Rosenberg knows about stories. Sitting in her Yeshiva University office in New York City’s Washington Heights, the creator of the Holocaust education project “Names, Not Numbers” recounted a student’s interview with the son of a Holocaust survivor. The son recalled asking his father, “Why do you survivors have all these stories?” And the father…
The Latest
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View From a Bridge of Posterity
Arthur Miller: 1915–1962 By Christopher Bigsby Harvard University Press, 776 pages, $35.00. Arthur Miller is, by any measure, the most eminent and the most acclaimed Jewish playwright the world has ever seen. Most people who know his name probably would accept his greatness as a given. Yet he has been attacked vigorously: for his left-wing…
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Self-Righteous Gentiles
In the vast graveyard that is Europe, there lies a sacred plot reserved for the Weimar Republic — Germany’s bright but stillborn sanctuary for liberalism, libertinism and a host of other projected freedoms. Idealized, treated more often as an allegory than as a historical event, and celebrated as much for its exiles as for its…
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Nine Tenths of the Law
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America By Beryl Satter Metropolitan Books, 512 pages, $30.00. The search for the absent father — whether he’s literally or emotionally absent — is a pervasive theme in theater, books and film. Rarely, however, does an author inject this theme into a work of…
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Redheaded Warrior Jews
Zack Miller writes from Bryant, Texas: “In the July 31 Forward, Allan Nadler reviewed two new books about Judah Halevi’s ‘The Kuzari.” Not surprisingly, this got me to thinking about the Khazars. Could you discuss the Yiddish term di royte yidn? I first came across it in Kevin Alan Brook’s speculation that these ‘red Jews’…
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Sparks Fly in the Brandwein: Classic Klezmer for Six Strings
The Piedmont region of the Eastern United States is best known for blues, not klezmer. But acoustic guitarist Tim Sparks, a native of Winston-Salem, N.C., is throwing the weight of his background behind Jewish folk music, reinventing both the music and the guitar in the process. “Little Princess,” Sparks’s fourth album exploring Jewish music, is…
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Not Science Fiction
Imagine worshipping a writer in early life, then becoming an essential force in preserving his work. This is Jonathan Lethem’s labor of love, to keep us reading Philip K. Dick. A music aficionado and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Lethem now has his own vast canon — seven novels, numerous stories, a novella, a comic book…
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Dreams of the Displaced
In the aftermath of World War II, roughly 250,000 Jews — most of them Holocaust survivors — lived in displaced persons camps in Europe. Many of these people were attracted to Zionism, and about two-thirds of them eventually would move to British Mandate Palestine or to Israel. In his new book, “Finding Home and Homeland:…
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At Home To War and Peace
The central moment in Doron Ben-Atar’s new play “Peace Warriors” about the personalities, politics and relationships of the American academic left can slip by if you don’t pay attention. It takes place at the home of Darryl (the wife) and Scooter (the husband) Lewis. The couple, both Jews, live in New Haven, where she teaches…
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