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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The Theater of War
You don’t have to turn on the evening news to watch live footage from the war zone. Instead, you can turn to the theater district. You’ll find Navy nurses and sailors belting their hearts out to the backdrop of the Asiatic-Pacific Theater in “South Pacific.” Or a three-and-a-half-hour crossfire — with bullets made equally of…
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Food and Drink, Part 3
Since we’ve already had a glimpse of the main categories of Yiddish food, today we’ll look at everything you need for a balanced meal: vegetable, grains, main courses, a few uniquely Yiddish side dishes and something to wash it all down with. Vegetables BOOrik beet KROYT cabbage MAIR carrot OOgerkeh cucumber KNOBL garlic KHRAIN horseradish…
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A Voice for the Women of Ravensbrück
Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbrück: Who Were They? By Judith Buber Agassi Oneworld Publications, 352 pages, $85. In recent times, we have witnessed an increase in testimonies that provide a particularly female voice to the brutalities of World War II. And, more than all the other concentration camps, extermination centers and ghettos combined, the Ravensbrück…
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Daughter of a Voice
Forward reader Barry Seidel of Newark, Del., asks about the origin of the Hebrew expression bat-kol and wonders “how interesting and valuable the concept has been to Jewish thought.” Bat-kol is indeed a unique Hebrew expression that has no real equivalent in any other language that I know of. Literally the “daughter of a voice,”…
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Music Heeb-ish, Not Jewish
The hipster humorists at Heeb Magazine are taking their cool cultural gestalt out West, organizing a music festival in Oakland, Calif. But, they want to be clear, it’s not a Jewish music festival. San Francisco’s always informative (albeit unfortunately named) Jewish newsweekly J. reports that the “Heeb fest won’t include any Jewish programming or content,…
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A Strong Voice Quietly Changing the Cantorate
In 1993, as I was preparing to produce a recorded anthology representing 25 years of my synagogue music, I found myself searching for a particular kind of voice — one that was harder to find than you might expect. I was looking for a cantor who could bring an authentic American/Ashkenazic vocal sensibility to the…
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How Did Jews Choose Their Last Names?
Sam Sherman of Voorhees, N.J., writes: “Many Jewish family names are those of cities in Europe, often with a suffix that means ‘a resident of.’ For example: Berlin-er, Frankfurt-er, Minsk-y, Pinsk-y, Slutsk-y, Posnan-ski, Smolensk-y, etc. But surely these families weren’t known by the names of their cities while they were living there: They must have…
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A Bridge, Yes, But to Where?
Approaching Jerusalem by Highway 1 from Tel Aviv, the mast of architect Santiago Calatrava’s Chords Bridge first rears up from atop a distant ridge, a white bolt against the eastern sky. At 387 feet, the central tower, with its 66 cross-strung steel cables, is now the tallest structure in the city, and its completion has…
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The Relative Arts
Albert Einstein elucidated his theories of relativity in detached, specific prose, with no thought for style or flourish. We should be thankful that he never wrote philosophy, produced a novel or wrote a sequence of poems. The laureate of Germany, and later of Princeton, was no painter, either, and no sculptor. And though he relished…
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Picturing Evil
After stumbling across a newspaper article about the Holocaust archives at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, Richard Ehrlich, a California-based surgeon-turned-photographer, decided that he wanted to document them. This quixotic impulse proved as difficult as one might imagine: At the time, the archives were closed to the public. But Ehrlich persisted. After…
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Inspired by Jazz, a Poet Does ‘His Own Thing’
The recent PEN/Oakland National Book Awards were a bit of a change of pace for Steve Dalachinsky. For one thing, the poet’s usual performance venues are smoky Manhattan bars and tiny underground jazz clubs, not academic auditoriums. For another, Dalachinsky is far more accustomed to going to other people’s performances than to his own. In…
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