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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Tutors Tackle Tinseltown
When entertainment executive Marc Potash landed a job at Universal Pictures last spring, the offer didn’t come out of the blue. After all, Potash had an inside connection at Universal — not because of his background in film production, but because he had been the bar mitzvah coach of the studio co-chairman’s son. Potash, 28,…
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Holocaust Memorial Takes Flight
Hundreds of thousands of butterflies from around the world are flocking to the Holocaust Museum Houston as part of an educational program about the Holocaust. The museum’s Butterfly Project is attempting to collect 1.5 million handmade butterflies to represent the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust. So far, it has received more than…
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Conservative Schools Rethink Israel Studies
This month, a new middle-school curriculum focused on Israel will be launched as a pilot program in Conservative congregational schools. Israel Today is the final unit of Project Etgar, a curriculum currently being tried out in 25 supplementary schools affiliated with Conservative synagogues. “If you go to synagogue school, you come out thinking that Israel…
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Butterflies Teach a Colorful Lesson
Pavel Friedman’s enduring words inspired others to collect butterflies, as well. A few years ago, artist and activist Sue Klau visited New York’s Jewish Museum with her husband. She toured an exhibit of paintings from children in Theresienstadt and read Pavel’s poem “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.” She turned to her husband and said, “Let’s…
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Supplementary Schools Preserve Israeli Culture in America
When Raveetal Celine and her husband, Graham, moved to the Boston area from Israel in 1999, their young daughters settled nicely into their new life — a little too nicely, Celine felt. The girls’ Hebrew began slipping away, and their American friends were crowding out Israelis. Concerned that her daughters would lose their Israeli identity,…
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Lawyers Turn to Talmud for Continuing Education
When it comes to making a case before a jury, every bit of supporting information counts — even if it’s 2,000 years old. New York-based attorney Robert Persky has been taking courses for seven years at The Institute of American and Talmudic Law, which offers classes comparing a wide range of issues in American jurisprudence…
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Orthodox Schools Test the Waters With ‘Intimacy Education’ Classes
Sexual education courses are taught regularly to adolescents in public schools, but the subject isn’t part of the typical curriculum offered at Orthodox Jewish day schools. This situation, however, might soon change. A new effort that is under way could leave a permanent mark on the ways in which Orthodox educators handle classroom instruction of…
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Dual-Degree Program Targets Agency Leaders
In an effort to better prepare Jewish communal organizations’ future leaders, a new graduate-school program in New York will combine Jewish studies with management training. The Jewish Professional Leadership Program — a dual-degree program that is run under the partnership of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University — will offer students the opportunity to…
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Enrollment Up at Community Day Schools
By her own admission, Laurie Minsk was initially “very skeptical” about sending her two children to a Jewish day school. A Seattle resident who had grown up attending the city’s excellent public schools, Minsk, 48, worried about academic rigor and about whether an all-day Jewish school would mesh with her family’s Reform lifestyle. But as…
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Youth Group Offers Staffers Free MBAs
‘It’s too good to be true.” That’s how Rachel Lederman describes the opportunity she now faces. Lederman, a 23-year-old program director for the Jewish youth group BBYO, is waiting to hear if she’ll be among the 20 young professionals from the organization who will be awarded a full scholarship to earn a Master of Business…
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Orthodox School To Teach Job Skills
Yeshiva students may soon have the option to continue their Jewish studies with a few job skills thrown in. Chabad-Lubavitch, the Hasidic sect, and International Bramson ORT, a not-for-profit Jewish organization that promotes vocational training, are teaming up to start a school in which ultra-Orthodox students will study Talmud in the morning and learn computer…
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