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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Moishe House: Building in Beijing
My roommates and I built the only rooftop sukkah in Beijing, 16 floors above the traffic on Second Ring Road, overlooking Sinopec headquarters and the small Olympic park next door. It was a true Chinese sukkah — made in part with PVC pipes and metal wire from a local construction market — and we were…
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Coming of Age in Cambodia
This past July, a few high school students and I sat around an unusable fireplace in an air-conditioned library at Yale. The teenagers wore flip-flops and short shorts and sunburns; they peppered their speech with “like,” as well as their newly acquired SAT vocabulary. At my behest, they were discussing the ethicist Peter Singer. Singer…
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A Good Education: Foundation Celebrates 18 Years
With 18 years and counting of support for innovative initiatives in Jewish education, the Covenant Foundation marked its chai anniversary last month with a three-day celebration in New York City. The festivities included a gala evening, dispersal of awards and — true to Covenant Foundation form — opportunities for serious discussion among some of North…
The Latest
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Let’s Talk About Sex
Because she’s 17, Laura Alonge hears a lot of sex jokes. She and her friends have all seen “Knocked Up” and “Superbad” and the million other horny-stoner-kids films that have recently captured the hearts and minds of high schoolers across the country. It drives her crazy, though, that her peers don’t know truth from fiction….
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Office Space — A Communal Setting
Back in September, JBooks.com, the Web site I edit, teamed up with JVibe*, the magazine for Jewish teens, to throw an intergenerational event called Get Lit 2008. Preparing for this literary *soirée (which featured writers Tova Mirvis, Jonathan Wilson, Adam Wilson and Jon Papernick) was a lot of work, but publicizing it was remarkably easy….
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Women’s Foundation Gets Creative
When the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York was planning a celebration for its 10 year anniversary in 2006, the group decided to commemorate the milestone by giving out its largest grant in history: a sum of $300,000, to be paid over three years. It was a significantly larger amount than the foundation had ever…
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Shelter From the Storm
Lisa Nord and Jay Podberesky were hard at work on a recent Sunday, cutting sheetrock and trimming window frames in a bare space in Brooklyn that will one day be a home for a family in need. They could have slept in on that chilly day, but instead they came out to work with other…
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Online Shoppers Raise Money
Whether it’s for purely altruistic purposes or for a big, fat tax break, many of us have been known to give to charity — especially around the High Holy Days. Most of us choose a handful of pet causes, sign our names to a few checks and forget about them until next year’s Yom Kippur…
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City Team Ramps Up
Fighting poverty and improving public education are no easy tasks, but for young activists living in such a huge city as New York, finding kindred spirits to march with at the next rally can be a challenge in its own right. A group of politically progressive Jewish 20-somethings is trying to make it a little…
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The Changing Nature of Jewish Philanthropy
In the early 1990s, the iconic Oldsmobile unveiled an advertising campaign trumpeting, “It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile.” The ad slogan was part of General Motors’ attempt to lure buyers back to a car make that had lost its way and become increasingly anachronistic. Would-be purchasers had turned away, associating the Olds with an earlier time…
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Foundations Weigh Options in Tough Economic Times
In the continuing coverage of Wall Street woes, add Jewish foundations to the mix. Like almost everyone, Jewish foundations are taking a hit these days as investments continue to lose value and endowments dwindle. While it is still too early to gauge exactly how much money has been lost and what will happen from here,…
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