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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An Olympic Welcome, From Your Friendly Neighborhood Big Brother
The colorful billboards that hang along the highways, boulevards and parks here declare the Beijing 2008 Olympic slogan, “One World One Dream,” in a number of languages, including Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Russian. Hebrew did not make the cut. Given that the entire population of world Jewry could fit into this city of 17…
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Reel Life: Israeli Artist Maya Zack Makes a Powerful American Debut
It doesn’t much matter whether “Mother Economy,” the 19-minute film that went on view at New York’s Jewish Museum on July 1, is experimental cinema or video art. This modest exhibition, continuously screening in the 300-square-foot Goodkind Media Center through October 23 and marking the American debut of Israeli artist Maya Zack, is a powerfully…
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Revivifying Identity
Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy By Natan Sharansky, with Shira Wolosky Weiss PublicAffairs, 304 pages, $26.95. Everyone knows something terrible is happening. This much seems self-evident. There were the attacks of September 11, 2001, followed by the incomplete overthrow of the Taliban, followed by the invasion of Iraq, set against the backdrop…
The Latest
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Embracing Human Complexity, at Life’s Most Painful Moments
For some time now, I’ve been meaning to comment on the variety of ways by which contemporary American Jews have redefined the tradition of sitting shiva, from reducing its length to three days — and, in some instances, even to just one day — from seven, to removing the ritual practice from the precincts of…
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A General Guide to a Specific Kind of Judaism
Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism By Rebecca T. Alpert The New Press, 192 pages, $23.95. The general thesis of Rebecca Alpert’s new book, “Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism,” is that the old saying about two Jews and three opinions contains more than a seed of truth. Alpert cycles back…
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Training a Lens on Israel’s Female Soldiers
Serial No. 3817131 By Rachel Papo Powerhouse Books, 128 pages, $39.95. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child proclaims that its signatory states “shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited…
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August 8, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The Forward received a heartbreaking letter from the two young Volotshinsky sisters, 6-year-old Hinde and 4-year-old Gishe, addressed to their father, who abandoned them and their mother in a shtetl near Minsk nearly five years ago: “Dear Father, we’re sending you a photograph of us so you can see…
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The Meaning of Khnyok
‘Growing up in Israel,” Anna Choder Hampton of Minneapolis writes, “I would hear my parents, both secular Jews (my mother from Poland and my father from Ukraine), use the word ‘chnyok’ — uttered with great disdain — when referring to ultra-Orthodox Hasidim. What exactly does ‘chnyok’ mean? In what language is it?” Khnyok — it’s…
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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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