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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Part II: Writing in My Father’s Footsteps
When my father was 9, his mother, Bessie, developed cancer. At the age of 12, my father returned home from school to find all the mirrors in his home covered; Bessie had passed away, and my father was told by his father, Bennie, a fruit salesman, that Bessie had died because my father had been…
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March 6, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, near the corner of Essex and Grand streets, policemen dragged and shoved Ida Levinskovitz, a Jewish peddler, after arresting her for selling tomatoes on Hester Street without a license. After one officer arrested Levinskovitz, another came to help him push her down the street…
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MacMillan and Strife: A New ‘St. John Passion’
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council decreed that the death of Jesus “cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today.” You wouldn’t think the decree had done any such thing after listening to a new “St. John Passion,” by Scottish-Catholic composer James MacMillan. The composition premiered…
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Hollywood Hath No Fury Like a Jewish State Scorned
Dear Hollywood, I watched the Academy Awards on Sunday, and I’m very disappointed in you. I’m not talking about Hugh Jackman’s song-and-dance numbers, or the inane montages and lengthy intros that made an already time-consuming ceremony feel even more protracted. I’m talking about Israel. Let’s be honest here, Hollywood: Israel deserved that Oscar for Best…
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Gail Hareven’s Confessional
The work of Gail Hareven, one of Israel’s most prominent writers of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, is being introduced to an English-speaking audience with the recent release of “The Confessions of Noa Weber” (Melville House). This novel tells the story of the titular character’s struggle between her feminist ideology and her yearning for love…
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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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