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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Stranger in a Strange Land
D. Nahil writes: “Although I was referred to in a blog as a sheygetz in a kind, jovial manner, I’m actually a middle-aged goy who follows the Torah and is thinking of a halakhically Orthodox conversion. What word would be used, more correctly, to describe me (again, in a jovial manner)?” If Mr. Nahil’s letter…
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Bound Up for Two Decades: A Test of Faith
Twenty years ago, young composer Lawrence Goldberg entered his one-act opera about the binding of Isaac into The Jewish Music Commission of Los Angeles’ competition for a new pulpit opera. Of the resultant piece, “A Test of Faith,” Dr. Richard Braun, chairperson of the commission, reported: “It was just the kind of piece that we hoped…
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A Prayer of One’s Own
A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book By Aliza Lavie Spiegel & Grau, 448 pages, $35. God speaks to Jewish women as well as to Jewish men. God loves Jewish women as well as God loves Jewish men. From biblical times to the present, there have been prayers that speak to this love, answer this call and…
The Latest
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When a Blessing Is an Error
Four readers — Martin Flax, Gerald Weiss, Steve Oren and Gil Kulick — have written to scold me for mistakenly equating the biblical name Barak, meaning “lightning,” with the presidential name Barack in my column of October 31, which dealt with Hebrew campaign buttons in America’s recent elections. They all made the same point —…
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The Man With the Yellow Star: The Jewish Life of Serge Gainsbourg
Visitors to Paris may have noticed, in an otherwise ritzy neighborhood in the posh seventh arrondissement, a small building at 5 bis Rue d e Verneuil that is abundantly covered in garish multicolored graffiti. It is the home of the late French singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg (1928–1991), born Lucien Ginsburg in Paris’s humble 20th arrondissement. His…
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A Rip in the Fabric of Mother
All Odd and Splendid By Hilda Raz Wesleyan University Press, 108 pages, $22.95. In the beginning, there is gender. “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl,” we say. That’s our genesis, the bedrock on which we build our selves and our lives. That’s why when the gender of someone we love shifts, our selves, lives…
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Of Giants’ Robes and Dwarvish Thieves
The Clothes on Their Backs By Linda Grant Scribner, 304 pages, $27.50 (hardcover), $14 (trade paperback). Toward the end of Philip Roth’s poignant story “Eli the Fanatic,” Eli, exhausted by his fruitless efforts to get a Hasidic yeshiva to leave his nicely acculturated Jewish neighborhood, decides to adopt a different strategy. He wraps his Brooks…
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Art and Apocrypha: The Fraught Beauty of the Dead Sea Scrolls
They survived, untouched, for nearly two millennia, but the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been, since their discovery in 1947, fraught with controversy. Ownership, religious patrimony, Christian-Jewish relations and the odor of antisemitism emanating from some Christian scholars who controlled access to the scrolls — these have roiled the academic and public-affairs worlds…
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December 5, 2008
100 Years Ago in the Forward An interesting and unusual case is currently before the courts in Warsaw. The editor of the Polish newspaper S.L. Kempner is being sued by a tailor named Yosef Cohen for reporting in the paper that in order to get out of paying rent, Cohen spread a rumor that ghosts…
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Defined by Quality
Concerts and CDs featuring composers who died during the Holocaust have become commonplace, with such once forgotten names as Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944), Pavel Haas (1899–1944) and Gideon Klein (1919–1945) receiving posthumous tributes. Yet these honors, sincere and well deserved as they undoubtedly are, tend to type composers and their music in the somber region of…
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Symphonies Lost and Found
You would have thought that musicians who escaped fascist Germany would feel liberated to compose in freedom. Not so. Restarting a career in a new country at any time is full of pitfalls, and even outside Germany, conservative musical tendencies in the 1930s were equated, rightly or wrongly, with the Nazi rejection of “degenerate” art….
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