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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Curating Jewish Culture in the Age of Electronic Reproducibility
Jewish liturgy prefaces a number of prayers with the phrase “Our God and God of our Ancestors,” which I have always taken to mean that there is a spirit of tradition of which it is the responsibility of each generation to make sense, and renew. For our generation, the challenge is to make Jewish culture…
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The Moving Forward, Mir Trogn Zikh Ariber?
Where were we? Ah, yes, tomatoes. Last week, I put off writing a column about the Yiddish word for them, *pomedorn, *in order to write one about *tfu, tfu, tfu *instead. This week, I promised you that I’d get back to them. But man plans and God laughs, as we say in Yiddish. Checking my…
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Leonard Cohen’s Ambiguous ‘Hallelujahs’
On February 19, famed Canadian Jewish singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, 74, will be performing his first New York concert in more than 15 years. Cohen’s song “Hallelujah,” rife with biblical imagery, has recently been revived for a new generation on such reality shows as “American Idol” and Britain’s “The X-Factor,” where young listeners refer to it…
The Latest
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February 27, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward A man walked into the offices of the Forward and told us the following: “My name is Sam Engelman, and I come from Toronto, Canada. Every Sunday for the past two weeks, my picture has appeared in your Gallery of Disappeared Men. I felt very bad upon seeing my…
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Senior Center
Light here is old, suspended cloudy, from the cathedral ceiling, far above the somehow brighter sheen of its reflection on the checkered linoleum, on the backing and thick legs of the metal chairs around the bridge tables, the mah jong tables, the bingo tables— light stumbles, it seems, it gropes, not so much from the…
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Celebrated Collection of Hebrew Texts on View, on Sale
Jack Lunzer, whose private collection of more than 11,000 Hebrew books and manuscripts is on display at the New York auction house Sotheby’s until February 19, has a line he often repeats: “When two or three Jews get together, they buy a printing press.” The Valmadonna Trust Library, which is valued at more than $40…
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The Aesthetics of Violence Examined
Following the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was caught musing that the event was “the greatest work of art that is possible,” a statement that provoked widespread outrage and led to the cancellation of several concerts of his work. Though New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini, among others,…
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Eliran Scores a Stunner
Eliran Atar, his immense talent rescued from a life of petty crime, scores an amazing goal in the Israeli soccer league. Bnei Yehuda (in orange) are the gutsy underdogs from the wrong side of the tracks playing against Maccabi Netanya, the third-best team in the country — owned by the millionaire Daniel Jammer and coached…
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Martin Munkacsi: The Prodigal Archives
To see him roaming the halls of Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1960s, poor and desperate for commissions, it must have been hard to believe that only a few decades earlier, Martin Munkacsi was one of the world’s highest-paid photographers. During a 2007 retrospective of his work, shown in New York at the International Center…
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You Shoot, He Scores: The Kibbutz King of Komposers
“My grandparents drained swamps and established Kibbutz Merchavia in northern Israel. My father, an actor/director, and my mother, a teacher/poet, lived on it and raised three sons there… They divorced when I was 20. I moved to Tel Aviv to study at the Music Academy and was advised by my guru, ‘There’s nothing more for…
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Animated Catharsis
Despite eight nominations spanning 44 years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has never bestowed its award for best foreign language film on an Israeli picture. Many expect that this will change this year at the 81st Annual Academy Awards, to be aired February 22, thanks to the nomination of “Waltz With Bashir.”…
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Yiddish די „ייִדישיסטישע ישיבֿה“ איז אָפֿן פֿאַר נײַע תּלמידיםThe Yiddishist Yeshiva is open for registration
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