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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Yelling Melodiously
It is no easy feat to yell melodiously, but the Jewish rock quartet The Shondes has achieved just that. The screams on their new album, “The Red Sea,” sound ancient and somewhat cantorial, piping in from the Old Testament to talk to us about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, misogyny, Bible tales and intimacy. Sonically, the music…
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‘Arab Jew,’ Part II
I have received two long letters arguing with my column of two weeks ago, in which I objected to the term “Arab Jew.” Here are parts of them. From Jack Warga of Boynton Beach, Fla.: My family lived for at least 150, and probably several hundred, years in Poland. I spoke Polish and attended a…
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Clash and Learn
Tova Hartman, co-founder of the “halakhic, egalitarian” Jerusalem synagogue Shira Hadasha, is a familiar voice to many readers of these pages. She has been active in various organizations, including the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, where she is an outspoken critic of what she refers to as the “hijacking” of the discourse around feminism in the…
The Latest
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February 8, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Esther Shpiz, a 60-year-old resident of Hester Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was on her way to visit her friend, Becky Shupinski, who lives nearby in an Orchard Street tenement. After trudging up to Shupinski’s fifth-floor apartment, Esther walked over to the hallway window to get a breath…
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Film & TV Neurotics of the World Unite!: Larry David To Star in Woody Allen’s Next Film
Entertainment Weekly reports: Larry David, the mind behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, is set to be the lead in Woody Allen’s next, as-yet-untitled feature, which is scheduled to shoot in New York City in the spring. Plot details are being kept under wraps, but David will act alongside Evan Rachel Wood. E.W. notes that…
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Extraordinary Nostalgia
Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography – the German and Early American Years By Joachim Prinz Edited and introduced by Michael A. Meyer Indiana University Press, 270 pages, $34.95 When it comes to portraying rabbinical figures, Philip Roth has not been the kindest writer around. Yet in his 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,” a…
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Schnorientalism: The Tao of Jews
As even the most tenuous speaker of Chinese can tell you, travels in that country mean having the same Inevitable Conversation over and over. And over. “Oh!” the locals will pretend to swoon. “Your Chinese is excellent!” “No, no,” comes your polite or honest reply. “It’s really nothing.” “Where are you from?” “What is your…
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Composing the Exile: Steve Bernstein’s Latest ‘Diaspora’ Album
Not many musicians appear both on the experimental jazz scene and in Anheuser-Busch ads, but then again, trumpeter Steve Bernstein is not your average musician. A polymath with prodigious chops, Bernstein — who in addition to composing is an arranger for pop albums, children’s TV shows and movie soundtracks — has been gigging some 34…
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Aleksander Skidan Sees ‘Red’
Aleksander Skidan has a talent that, like his nose, is poetically bent — left of center, pensively down-turned and seriously humorous. A poet and essayist by nature, and a translator by necessity, he is one of the foremost Russian writers of his turbulent generation. He was born in Leningrad in 1965 and lives in the…
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A Sarajevo Haggadah Inquiry
Jeremiah Riemer from Madison, N.J., writes: “I have a case for you having to do with journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks’ fascinating and inspiring New Yorker story about the Sarajevo Passover Haggadah. It involves the Hebrew root that gives us the word Haggadah, the literal meaning of which is ‘narration.’ Haggadah comes from the verb…
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February 1, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward Judah Magnes has hit his Yahudim where it hurts. A few weeks ago, Rabbi Magnes of Temple Emmanuel gave a sermon in which he criticized those Jews who marry off their children to Christians in churches. Well-known businessman Louis Stern, a synagogue board member and trustee who recently had…
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