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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Film & TV
American Apparel to Woody: We’re Sorry (and We’re Parodists)
American Apparel is apologizing to Woody Allen after he filed a $10 million lawsuit against the trendy T-shirt monger for its unauthorized use of an image of him dressed in Hasidic garb on a pair of billboards. “We deeply admire Woody Allen as a filmmaker and an inspiring social and political satirist,” the company said…
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Happy Ending
The following celiac-friendly dessert recipe is from Susie Fishbein’s new cookbook, “Passover by Design” (ArtScroll Shaar Press). Lemon Meringues pareve, non-gebroktsmakes 6 servings Meringues: 2 egg whites pinch of fine sea salt ½ cup sugar, super-fine if possible ½ teaspoon vanilla extract ¼ teaspoon almond extract Lemon Cream: 1½ cups sugar ¹⁄³ cup potato starch…
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Picturing Today’s Conversos
In northern New Mexico’s Sandoval County, there is a tombstone of a World War II veteran in a cemetery nestled in the desert brush. The name of the man, who was born in 1921 and died in 1980, is Adonay P. Gutierrez, and it is engraved on the stone below a cross. Nine different Native…
The Latest
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Horn of Plenty
It’s rarely wise to single out a particular group of instrumentalists — saxophonists, pianists, laptop artists — as an engine of change in a given genre. Doing so usually just means you’ll end up ignoring the vast numbers of other people doing equally interesting work. Still, some things are hard to ignore. So if I…
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Israel, in Polyethylene and Concrete
The Girl on the FridgeBy Etgar Keret Translated from the Hebrew by MiriamShlesinger and Sondra Silverston Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages, $12. Since its rebirth as a modern language, Hebrew has undergone a metamorphosis, from the closed but immensely rich language of sacred literature — with all the references and reverences and books within…
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Painting Apartheid’s Silhouette
William Kentridge’s tapestry, “Porter Series: Géographie des Hebreux ou Tableau de la dispersion des Enfants de Noë” (2005), shows two silhouetted figures, with their respective heads replaced by a rotary telephone and a megaphone, walking over a map of southern Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East. The map mostly follows Genesis’s account of the…
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What We Talk About When We Talk About God
A Touch of the Sacred: A Theologian’s Informal Guide to Jewish Belief By Eugene B. Borowitz and Frances W. Schwartz Jewish Lights Publishing, 256 pages, $21.99. A few years ago, I met a young man actively involved in the minyan movement in New York City. He was excited to tell me about how Jews of…
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Yiddish To Ease a Worried Mind: A Forverts Scrapbook
From April to November of last year, the Museum of the City of New York featured an exhibit on the history of the Forward. When Jaime Rubin, director of medical research at Columbia University walked through the show over the summer, she realized that her family also had a contribution: her grandfather’s Forverts clippings scrapbook,…
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Retracing Columbus’s Steps and Finding a Novel Path
Claims that Christopher Columbus was Jewish have been circulating for years, though they’ve generally been confined to the rarified realms of medieval history departments and those few obsessed with the Discoveries period. Even Simon Wiesenthal believed Columbus was a Jew; in 1973, he published a book on the explorer, “Sails of Hope,” and quipped that…
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Holiday Cheer
Who better to ask about great wines for Passover than people who buy wine for a living? At the Israwinexpo 2008 in Tel Aviv, I tasted kosher wine with a diverse group of buyers for American-based retailers, including HEB Kosher Store, Best Cellars, A&P Liquor, BevMax and Skyview. Israel is emerging as a high-quality wine…
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A Kid-Friendly Seder
Purim is funny. Passover, not so much. My kids always have a hard time transitioning out of Purim, with its nutso kid-friendly awesomeness. Grandma Betsy’s chocolate hamentashen will always trump leaden macaroons and The Jellied Fruit Slices of Doom. And this year, Josie was old enough to groove along to our shul’s Purim shpiel, “The…
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