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 Wife, Down and Out in Berlin
This Must Be the Place By Anna Winger Riverhead Books, 303 pages, $24.95. Days after moving to Berlin from Brooklyn this summer, I fell into a deep funk. It was the kind of can’t-get-out-of-bed depression where at 5 p.m. you realize that you haven’t left the apartment all day — except once, and that was…
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The Christian Soldiers of the Holy City
Knights of Jerusalem: The Crusading Order of Hospitallers, 1100-1565 By David Nicolle Osprey Publishing, 224 pages, $25.95. They began as a charitable organization, a brotherhood charged with caring for Jerusalem’s indigent pilgrims before the First Crusade. They ended the Crusades as warlords, infamous for their violence and greed. This role reversal would seem to be…
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Art That Is at Once Lush and Spare
As a graphic artist, Mark Podwal has long been taken with ritual and mysticism, mythology and superstition, angels and magic — particularly as these implicate and influence Jewish tradition via midrash and Kabbalah. Jewish folk beliefs are central to his work. But to Podwal, folk traditions are a vehicle in a larger enterprise: nothing less…
The Latest
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A Step-by-Step Guide to Peace in Israel
The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last By Bernard Avishai Harcourt, 304 pages, $26. The old adage notwithstanding, everyone judges a book by its cover. When the cover features a subtitle that promises to tell us how lasting peace can be achieved for Israel, the skeptical reader…
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Versatile Dutch Author Fills an Important Gap
As a young Dutch Jew growing up as part of an Orthodox Jewish family in southern Holland in the 1960s, Leon de Winter turned to Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer to understand post-Holocaust Europe. Kafka’s feeling of “seasickness on dry land,” combined with Singer’s “Every human being, even if he is an idiot, is…
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Don’t Worry About a Maverick in This Campaign
Although I try to keep this a Jewish-language column, sometimes a question is asked of me that offers a pretext for sneaking in an outside issue. Such is a letter I recently received from David H. Margulies of Bethesda, Md. Mr. Margulies writes: “Contemporary political rhetoric has driven me to explore the origin and meaning…
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September 26, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward In the wake of New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham’s accusation that Jews commit the majority of crime in the city, the Forward received a letter from an actual thief who is currently imprisoned in “The Tombs.” The imprisoned man’s friends brought him copies of the Forward, and…
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Between Two Cultures: In Jerusalem, a Breakthrough Show of Works by Arab-Israelis
Opening a new exhibition of Arab Israeli art in Jerusalem — the first of its kind at any Israeli museum — are three etchings from the 1970s by Walid Abu-Shakra. At first glance they appear to be simple etchings of a village landscape: desolate and dry, absent of humans, perhaps the remains of an evacuated…
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God of Judgment, God of Love
As the season of repentance approaches, our Jay Michaelson offers some thoughts on the meaning of judgment, forgiveness and love, and how to think of the Infinite to whom the new year’s prayers will be directed. Every year at this time, for at least the past decade, I have struggled with the theology of atonement,…
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Trembling Before Allah
One year after the release of “Trembling Before G-d,” the iconic documentary on Orthodox Jewish gay men and lesbians, filmmaker Sandi DuBowski embarked on a project that was both deeply similar and utterly different from his first undertaking. In 2002, DuBowski agreed to produce “A Jihad for Love,” which would explore the plight of gays…
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: I Remember Mameleh
It all starts with TAteh MAmeh Dad pa Mom ma If the tateh and mameh are yours, and you’re a kid, they’re usually TAteshee/TAtesheh Daddy MAmeshee/MAmesheh Mommy If you’re using any of these as titles in direct address, you use them exactly as they appear above: TAteshee, TAtesheh, LOZ MIKH NISHT aLAYN Daddy, daddy, don’t…
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