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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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…
The Latest
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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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Back to Orthodox Judaism by Way of the Dalai Lama
Spiritual Journey Home: Eastern Mysticism to the Western Wall By Nathan Katz *KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 192 pages, $27.50. * Nathan Katz’s autobiography, “Spiritual Journey Home,” is at once personal and paradigmatic. Coming from a traditional Jewish background, Katz was propelled by the 1960s into an Eastward-bound spiritual quest. Not content with a mere adolescent…
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Philologos Gets Roasted — And Eaten
In a response to my February 20 column on the American Yiddish verb mufn, in which I said, “You won’t, of course, find *mufn *in any Yiddish dictionary,” Solon Beinfeld of Cambridge, Mass., writes: “In Alexander Harkavy’s 1928 edition of his celebrated Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary*, we find ‘mufn (Am.), to move.’ Uriel Weinreich’s 1968 Modern English-Yiddish…
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Part III: Writing in My Father’s Footsteps
My father arrived in Marseilles in late July 1948, as a lace salesman from Belgium. Gloria Kessler, a nurse working at a hospital in Chicago, had decided to give up her career to smuggle herself into Palestine to help. She, too, received falsified documents from Teddy Kollek at the Hotel Fourteen and remembers sailing with…
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April 3, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward The world’s most beloved German-language actor, Adolf Sonenthal, has died of an apoplectic fit in Prague at the age of 75. Born in Budapest to a family of Jewish fabric merchants, Sonenthal grew up in that city’s Jewish quarter. Although he received a good education, Sonenthal was drawn to…
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David Roskies on Making the "Language of Jewish Secrets" Young Again
Author and Yiddish scholar David Roskies is out with a memoir that looks at his family’s transmission of Yiddish culture from the Old World of Vilnius to the New World of Montreal and New York. “Yiddishlands” (Wayne State University Press) takes readers on a journey through Eastern Europe, where Roskies’s grandparents owned a printing press…
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Music That Saves?
Birkenau, known as the death camp of Auschwitz, was one of the few camps where music accompanied mass murder. For 54 women who knew how to play instruments, music was a life saver. The Women’s Orchestra of Birkenau was the only such orchestra commissioned by the SS during World War II. The women played for…
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Pale Dreadlock Sabra
When I ask Idan Raichel, leader of the triple-platinum musical phenomenon The Idan Raichel Project, where he sees himself 10 years from now, he doesn’t divulge plans for future world (musical) domination. He doesn’t talk about how it’s entirely possible that by that point, he’ll have reached the level of international renown of a Paul…
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