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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Exquisite Knowledge of Destruction
‘Incident at Vichy” is generally considered one of Arthur Miller’s lesser plays. It was first produced in 1964, in the temporary home, near Washington Square, of New York City’s newly created Lincoln Center Theater. Despite a stellar cast including David Wayne, Hal Holbrook and Joseph Wiseman, and direction from Harold Clurman, this much anticipated drama…
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Freedom From The Slavery of Passover Seders
Passover is coming again, and with it, the irony of liberation. What irony? That while Passover is the Jewish holiday of freedom, so many of us feel enslaved to it. The cleaning, the prohibitions, the absurd details of kosher dish soap and unkosher salt, and worst of all, the endless drone of the Haggadah, which…
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Poet and Activist Rich, Still Dreaming Of a World Without Borders
A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1996-2008 By Adrienne Rich W.W. Norton & Co., 208 pages, $24.95. Seventy-nine-year-old Adrienne Rich has always refused to succumb to the multiple traumas that life has thrust upon her. One senses that this courageous poet and political activist has been blessed with an overabundance of resilience and…
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Why Is This Civil War Different From All Other Civil Wars?
All Other Nights By Dara Horn W.W. Norton & Co., 384 pages, $24.95. More than most other novelists of her generation, Dara Horn draws inspiration from neglected nooks of Jewish history. She set part of her first novel, “In the Image,” published in 2002, in Amsterdam before the German invasion. Horn, however, has been reluctant…
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With Frog in Throat
Since one of the guests we will be having for our Seder this year is a native French speaker who knows no Hebrew, he will get to use a Haggadah in our possession that is a facsimile of an original published nearly 200 years ago. Its title page is printed in both Hebrew and French,…
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April 10, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward The old-style Jewish atheist used to hate all religious ceremonies and would mock them bitterly, heaping scorn upon ancient customs. As such, Jewish atheists always turned up their noses at Passover Seders. But this year, it seems, there are many apikorsim who celebrate the Seder as a principle. In…
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Asher Roth Raps Suburbia, Campus Life
Success has been easy for Asher Roth, but respect is proving more elusive. A 21st century MySpace star, Roth owes his success almost entirely to the Internet. Hailing from suburban Morrisville, Pa., Roth — and his educated flow, was first discovered on MySpace by the producer Steve Rifkind. Without a song on radio or a…
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Offbeat Israel: Heists, Ultimate Frisbee and the Peace Process
At last we have it. An answer to the million-dollar question: How do you bring Israelis and Palestinians together? And it is … crime. A bank in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank city of Ramallah was robbed last week, and the thieves made off with the equivalent of $30,000. Palestinian police have revealed that of the…
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Simone Weil’s Rediscovered Jewish Inspiration
During his 1980 Nobel Prize lecture, poet Czesław Miłosz quoted French philosopher, mystic and social agitator Simone Weil, who claimed that “distance is the soul of beauty.” “Only through a distance,” Miłosz added, “in space or in time, does reality undergo purification.” February 3 marked the centenary of Weil (1909-1943), who died in England of…
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Yid Vid: Frum Rappers Put Aside Differences, Provoke Dismay
First Y-Love and Shneur Hasofer, a.k.a. DeScribe, collaborated on “Change” — a rockin’ track on the Modular Moods/Shemspeed label. Black, white, left, right, United States, Australia, all put aside to “uplift the mundane” in the name of Hashem. Then Elad Nehorai from Chabad.org covered it for the news service ChabadOnLine Live, and suddenly the lashon…
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David, My David
When you consider all the genealogies, digressions and picayune laws cluttering the pages of the Hebrew Bible, it’s no wonder that secular types are reluctant to read it. (The same probably goes for some religious types, although they may be less inclined to admit it.) Nevertheless, like Proust or exercise, the Bible rewards the diligent….
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