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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A Teacher’s Toolkit for Tackling Tough Issues
On a recent Sunday morning, the third graders at Congregation Brothers of Israel Religious School, in Newtown, Pa., had just settled in for a snack. “There’s this little girl who’s adorable, 8 years old,” recalled Joan Hersch, the school’s principal. “And this boy in her class said: ‘You’re fat. You don’t need that doughnut. I’m…
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Report: Israeli Education Gets a Failing Grade
Israel, you may have heard, produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation, by a large margin — 109 people per 10,000. Twenty-four percent of the Israeli work force holds university degrees, ranking the country third in that category in the industrialized world, after the United States and Holland. Israel also claims the…
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Jewish Punk: If Anyone Can, Can Can Can
Among those who raised money for Chabad in response to the murder of the group’s Mumbai representatives last month during the terrorist attack on that city, Patrick A.’s appeal was probably unique: “I had people put dollar bills in my pants while I was onstage, and I started screaming, ‘Put your money in my crotch…
The Latest
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No More Shoah, Let’s Build A New Israel
The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes By Avraham Burg, translated by Israel Amrani *Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pages, $26.95. * Avraham Burg’s new book, “The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes,” is maddening: It is by turns incisive and hard-hitting, but also bombastic, vague and repetitious. It is also…
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It’s Me, Isn’t It?
David Pollack of New York has a question about comparative grammar. Why is it, he asks, that in English, if you knock on a door and are asked who you are, you instinctively answer “It’s me” even though grammar would seem to demand that you say “It’s I,” while in Hebrew you instinctively answer “Zeh…
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A Church Father with A Stroke of Mercy?
Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism By Paula Fredriksen Doubleday, 512 pages, $35.00. The place of the Church Fathers in the contouring of Christianity, particularly with respect to demonizing the Jews, is well established, and their writings have been well rehearsed by theologians, scholars and religious leaders. Anti-Judaism was central…
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Armageddon in Suburbia
Question: What do evangelical Christians and credit-default swaps have in common? Answer: They both wrecked the country, but few understand exactly how they did it. All right, that’s an exaggeration. America will survive the current recession. And despite the influence of evangelicals, we do not live in One Nation Under Jesus. Of course, evangelical Christians…
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Jokes and Other Things the French Find Funny
In France, Christmastime just might not seem the same without a new antisemitic jape, and the performer Dieudonné (born Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, just outside Paris in 1966, of Breton-Cameroonian origin) provided one on schedule during a Paris show. In what noted Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld later described to RTL radio as a deliberate, publicity-seeking “provocation” and…
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January 23, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward “My dear husband! I have decided that I can no longer live with you. I am writing this letter with a wounded heart. My life with you has been unhappy because I do not love you. I am in love with Cohen and the two of us are leaving,…
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A Bounty of Hidden Gems
Just 20 miles south of the bustling modern city of Haifa lies a spot of Israel that time forgot. Few Israelis, never mind foreign visitors, have heard of Bat Shlomo. Like several other Zionist settlements, it was founded in the 1880s by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who helped residents with their often ill-fated agricultural projects….
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Five Sites That Whet the Appetite for Travel
The other night, I went looking for a synagogue in France. When I began my journey on the Web, I didn’t know that this particular synagogue was the country’s oldest; I only knew that it was in France and it was said to be a beauty. I learned about its age — deep roots into…
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