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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Revisiting the Early Days of the Nazi Comedy
Exactly how popular culture has grappled with Nazism over the past 60-odd years forms a peculiar sort of curve. In films, the trajectory began with stock-villain propaganda and then evolved (in the 1950s and ’60s) toward a defensive, Jewish-comic sardonicism, which found itself capable of using the German fascism as farce. This abated in the…
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Studying the Results of the ‘Year in Israel’
Flipping Out? Myth or Fact: The Impact of the ‘Year in Israel’ By Shalom Berger, Daniel Jacobson and Chaim Waxman Yashar Books, 235 pages, $24.95. Since the 1980s, it has become the norm in the Modern Orthodox community for high-school graduates to spend a year studying in yeshivas in Israel. More than 1,000 American 18-year-olds…
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Getting Chummy
‘Livni mitkasha lihyot sah.bakit,” said a headline in a Hebrew paper the other day. The subject of the headline was Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, now running in a primary contest to replace Ehud Olmert as head of Kadima, the ruling party in the country’s parliamentary coalition. Livni, who is known for her polite but…
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Jewish Schools Feel the Pinch
By all accounts, Isaac Bitton had a pretty good summer in 2007. As owner of the commercial company Apex Suspended Ceilings, he was making enough money to live a comfortable life with his wife and three kids in suburban Los Angeles, and had just opened a new business installing swimming pools in residential properties. As…
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Language Educators Rethink Their Hebrew Lessons
Rachel Jackson doesn’t remember learning Hebrew at the Jewish Community Day School, where she spent kindergarten through eighth grade, but something must have stuck: She’s now among the top Hebrew-language students at her Jewish high school. “Things I learned at JCDS, I don’t remember learning, because they seemed to come naturally,” Jackson said. Perhaps that’s…
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New Egalitarian Yeshiva Prepares To Go Full Time
On a recent weekday summer morning on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the second floor of West End Synagogue was buzzing. Thirty-six students, divided into pairs, clustered around tables, poring over open Talmuds. Some of the beginners flipped through lexicons, trying to puzzle out obscure words, while more advanced students debated that day’s text and compared…
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Rabbis Focus on Professional Development
Moses was probably an introvert. That was one of the conclusions reached by the rabbis who gathered at a pro fessional development seminar in Manhattan this summer. As part of the seminar, the rabbis took the Myers-Briggs personality test, which measures how introspective, intuitive and perceptive people are, to better understand how they operated in…
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Israel Textbook Paints a Complex Portrait
A new textbook written for young students presents a nuanced, critical and yet beautiful portrait of Israel, one that is designed to encourage these students to visit the country and embrace their Jewish heritage. “Artzeinu: An Israel Encounter” is an insider’s guide to the geography, history and culture of Israel, documenting the country that exists…
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As Arabic Makes Gains on Campus, Jewish Students Sign Up
After befriending a Palestinian from Ramallah in high school, Tahl Mayer — whose parents are Israeli — decided that he wanted to study Arabic in college. “It’s very important to learn languages,” he said, “because they help bridge the gap between cultures.” Mayer is hardly alone: An increasing number of Jewish students are studying Arabic…
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Farm School Brings Students Back to Their Roots
The Jewish Farm School is a new organization that hopes to bring Jews back to their agricultural roots by giving them a taste of what it means to grow their own food and reconnect with the soil. “We’re missing the people’s deep connection to the land and not engaging in the process of creating the…
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High School Program Strives To Keep Teens Connected
A high-school program that builds upon the success of the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School, one of the largest networks of Jewish adult education, is helping to keep Jewish teenagers connected to their faith and heritage. The Florence Melton Communi-teen High School — named after the late Florence Melton, a pioneer in Jewish education — encourages…
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Culture ‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
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Opinion It’s time for Jews who love Israel to give up on Zionism
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סאָװעטיש־ייִדיש איז געװען אַ ראַדיקאַלער עקספּערימענט, װאָס פֿאַרנעמט אַ װיכטיקן פּלאַץ אױף דער װעלטמאַפּע פֿון ייִדישער קולטור
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News A Jewish nonprofit was training men to prevent sexual abuse. Then the funding disappeared