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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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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Yid Vid: Writers’ Strike Leaves Woody Allen Speechless
The Latest
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The Mistress of Mistrust: Reading Nadine Gordimer’s New Collection
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories By Nadine Gordimer Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages, $21. ‘Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories” is the 11th collection of stories by Nadine Gordimer, and though it is not her best, it is better by leaps, bounds and all African distance than the work of most…
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Baruch on Broadway
Although his philosophical masterpiece, “Ethics,” written in the notoriously exact and forbidding “geometrical mode,” is one of the least dramatic works in the history of modern philosophy, and despite the dryness of both his personality and his intensely private life, Baruch Spinoza has exercised the imagination of a long line of dramatists. The parched prose…
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A Poet of Israel’s Pain, And Its Hope
On Ruins & Return By Rachel Tzvia Back Shearsman Books, 104 pages, $15. It is written in the Talmud that after the destruction of the Second Temple, Rabbi Akiva and three prominent rabbis saw a fox scavenging through the Holy of Holies. Though the other rabbis wept, Akiva began to laugh, reminding his colleagues of…
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A New Life for ‘Lifelong Learning’
American Jews are often taken to task for their sins, for their indulgent appetites, dwindling attendance at synagogue and the rising rate of intermarriages. But look again. Here, there and everywhere throughout the nation, American Jews are burying their noses in books and burning the midnight oil: Adult education or, as its current iteration would…
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Challenging Community’s Traditional Boundaries
A new documentary about a Philadelphia boy with Down syndrome preparing for his bar mitzvah is at turns inspiring, heartbreaking and likely to spark some soul-searching in the Jewish community about the inclusion of disabled people in religious life. “Praying With Lior,” which opens at Cinema Village in New York on February 1, received a…
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Rejecting the ‘Arab Jew’
‘A senior Saudi royal has offered Israel a vision of broad cooperation with the Arab world if it signs a peace treaty and withdraws from all occupied Arab territories,” a Reuters dispatch reported last week, citing an interview with former Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal. In the course of this interview,…
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The Day of the Shah’s Flight
Twenty-nine years ago, on February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini landed in Tehran after a 25-year exile. Ten days later, he dissolved the monarchy and established the Islamic Republic of Iran, nearly four weeks after the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, sick with lymphoma and unable to control his kingdom, had fled the country. For months…
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Music Whoever Said That Rappers and Orthodox Jews Don’t Mix?
Okay, I’m not sure anyone’s actually said that — and now nobody’s going to be able to say it, because we have ironclad evidence to the contrary. TMZ.com reports that the rapper Pharrell — who collaborated with Snoop Dogg on the hit single “Drop It Like It’s Hot” — “was driving around Miami when he…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
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Fast Forward As anti-LGBTQ laws spread, these two Jewish nonprofits are funding moves to safer states
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Culture At this interfaith calligraphy class, the lines between Jew and Muslim blur