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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Balancing Act
Lisa Appel spends more time standing on her head than most Jewish educators spend on their feet. The classroom veteran with an affinity for Hebrew songs also spins more plates and juggles more scarves than her colleagues, and she’s more likely to teach in sparkly attire and a bright-pink wig. In other words, Appel is…
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Truth Seekers: The Pursuit of Math
At the age of 25, most New Yorkers would think twice before spending $500 a month to finance an informal school of mathematics, especially in these times of economic uncertainty. But in mathematical terms, Avital Oliver would be called a statistical outlier. After deciding that he needed time away from academia, yet still finding himself…
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Struggling To Stay Afloat
Last August, just as the new academic year was starting, Rabbi Yaacov Dvorin, head of Hillel Torah North Suburban Day School, in Skokie, Ill., was facing an increase in the number of families applying for financial aid, decreased dollars coming in through fundraising efforts and the possibility of cutting back on teaching assistants. It was…
The Latest
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The Next Generation: Organizers and Activists Learn the Ropes
By 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, a dozen bleary-eyed idealists were already milling around, chewing absently on bagels and sipping from little orange juice cartons. Sunlight streamed into the windows of the fifth floor of the brownstone on East 10th Street in New York City, where they had gathered to talk about leadership development…
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Hollywood Drama About Jewish Resistance Hits the Classroom
High-school history instructors don’t normally find themselves on Hollywood guest lists, so filmgoers with better inside connections might have been surprised recently by the teachers’ presence at advance screenings of “Defiance,” the Holocaust drama that opened nationwide January 16 and stars James Bond actor Daniel Craig. But the film’s preview audiences, like the genre-altering movie…
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Culinary Arts: A Taste of Kosher Cooking
Tucked amid the shops on a busy street in Brooklyn, the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts is at first hard to find. The one-room school, located on the second floor of a housewares store, is small and unimposing. Despite its humble appearance, the center offers an impressive array of recreational classes for the home cook,…
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Building Jewish Identity, Preschool Program Expands Its Reach
At a table in the rear of classroom 3 of the nursery school at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, several of the children, ages 3 and 4, pause from busily gluing photographs of the class Hanukkah party onto a large piece of brown paper to explain to a visitor what they’re doing. “That’s my…
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A Beit Midrash Aims to Soothe Troubled Minds
It’s about 1:30 on a weekday afternoon, an hour before the students in the beit midrash, or study hall, will be dismissed. At a table strewn with books, notebooks and pens, young men are listening, chatting, smiling and scribbling. A tad more chaotic than a typical beit midrash, but the rabbi at the table doesn’t…
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A Cross-Denominational Approach to High School in the U.K.
To send her 11-year-old son to a Jewish high school was an obvious decision for Helena Miller, who until recently was director of education and development at a rabbinical college in London. But Miller noted that the process wasn’t as simple for the parents of some of her son’s friends: Their children were denied admission…
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Orthodox Institute Launches New Teacher Program
The Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute is gearing up to challenge the common understanding of the term “rabbi.” Over the centuries, “rabbi” has come to denote a person qualified to make judgments in Jewish law. But the original connotation was meant to describe a teacher. This fall, the Orthodox-run but pluralistic institute will launch a program…
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Guns With No Bloodstains
Michael Carasyk writes from Philadelphia: “It might be time for a column on the Hebrew expression *tohar ha-neshek, *which I haven’t heard in a while.” The Hebrew words *tohar ha-neshek *— literally, “the purity of arms,” or “the purity of the gun” — are known to every Israeli, and they refer to the moral duty…
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