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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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,…
The Latest
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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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Breakthrough After Breakthrough: Israeli Film History in Motion
One of the few surprises of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony was the snub of Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir,” the animated film about the First Lebanon War that seemed poised to win Israel its first ever statuette for best foreign film. Instead, the Oscar went unexpectedly (some might say inexplicably) to the Japanese film…
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The (Messy) Writing on the Wall
Two current shows at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art are a study in contrasts. The retrospective Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel shares the sixth floor, but little else, with Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective. Whereas the late German artist’s work (and life) was an ode to excess — he died in…
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Skokie Builds To Remember
Ever since the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1993, America has witnessed a Holocaust museum construction boom. The Museum of Tolerance (Los Angeles, 1993), the Holocaust Museum Houston (1996), the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (New York City, 1997) and the Holocaust…
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Kosher Sumo
‘A Matter of Size” (“Sipur Gadol”) happens to be one of the Israeli entries in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival — but it addresses personal conflict rather than the more stereotypical geopolitical conflict. Directed by Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor, the movie tells the story of an overweight Israeli chef who mutinies from the rigors…
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