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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The Yeshiva Fades From Recollection
The yeshiva fades from recollection and in the spaces of memory where voices are stored, the rabbis of my youth chant questions and answers, as they swim through the Talmud. And when I have fallen — there is the image of the head rabbi, his disciples assimilated in a circle of dance, until he, too,…
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Music Are Haredi Women Taking Their Cues From Outkast?
Some ultra-Orthodox women are defiantly taking seats at the back of Israeli buses in the name of what they see as religiously mandated gender-segregation. What’s more, as the Forward reports, some of them (or at least one of them) are comparing their actions to those of civil rights legend Rosa Parks. Let’s set aside the…
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Music Yid Vid: Natalie Portman Gets Subcontinental
Natalie Portman takes a page from Bollywood in a video from her bohemian beau Devendra Banhart (who is, no doubt, by now the object of loathing from jealous young Jewish men the world over): I’m waiting for the inevitable backlash from the Hindu circles that don’t take kindly to such acts of artistic appropriation. In…
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Philadelphia Prakas
Philadelphia-born Manhattanite Zelda R. Stern has this inquiry: “Every current or former Jewish resident of Philadelphia whom I know calls stuffed cabbage ‘prakas.’ My parents, who spoke Yiddish, called them that, but so did all other Jews. I never heard the Yiddish word holiptshes used for stuffed cabbage until the 1960s, when my family came…
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August 1, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward When a hotel has a sign on it that says “Hebrews not served,” the hotelkeepers usually say that it’s not a question of antisemitism, it’s just business. They say that if they let Jews in, their regular Christian customers won’t come. But whenever their regular business goes south, they…
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Coffee Talk: Reading Friedrich Torberg’s Masterpiece
Tante Jolesch or The Decline of the West in Anecdotes By Friedrich Torberg Translated by Maria Poglitsch Bauer, edited by Sonat Birnecker Hart Ariadne Press, 249 pages, $24. Café society finds its most perfect literary expression in the anecdote, a short, fast form embodying the corner table’s blend of gossip and exaggeration, caffeinated humor and…
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Under the Influence
Who were the first Jewish potheads? The Old Testament seems filled with early precursors: Daniel, the interpreter of colorful dreams; Ezekiel, with his visions of flying chariots; perhaps even David, whose tunes of ethereal majesty were conceivably inspired by some seriously bitter herbs. Other scholars might go back to Genesis — Adam and Eve in…
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Channeling the Power of Memory
Judaism Musical and Unmusical By Michael P. Steinberg *University of Chicago Press, 270 pages. $21. * When Michael Meyer published his classic book, “The Origins of the Modern Jew,” more than 40 years ago, that Jew turned out to be German. Because of the fitful and disastrously unsuccessful nature of Jewish emancipation, German Jews confronted…
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Everything Old is New Again
Analogies between music and language abound. Sometimes we liken music to a universal language that is able to transcend ordinary linguistic and cultural boundaries. Sometimes we talk about its innumerable local dialects, the genres and styles that mingle and give rise to yet more idiosyncratic forms. There are limits to these comparisons — scholars note…
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A Young Playwright’s Strange Trip
Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine By Jonathan Garfinkel W. W. Norton, 358 pages, $25.95. Jonathan Garfinkel’s new book, “Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine,” is, in a broad sense, the story of one man and his philosophical, spiritual and romantic crises. Pretty quickly, though, it’s revealed to be about the mostly predictable things that…
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Art That Does Not Hide Itself
Most of the works that appear in the exhibit Idol Anxiety, at the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, feature Christian and pagan content. But exhibit curator Aaron Tugendhaft credits the “heightened awareness” he developed from studying the Talmud as a child with helping him discover “valuable distinctions not seen by…
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