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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Family Reunion
Light Fell By Evan Fallenberg Soho Press, 229 pages, $22. Three times in the Babylonian Talmud we find the Aramaic expression nafal nehora — “light fell.” This is the light of a powerful physical beauty that behaves almost like matter, seemingly pulled down by gravitational force — a light that may kindle overwhelming desire. Sometimes…
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How I Finally Learned To Stop Worrying and Love (Okay, Like) Christmas
It’s hard to be a Jew on Christmas My friends won’t let me join in any games. And I can’t sing Christmas songs Or decorate a Christmas tree Or leave water out for Rudolph ’cause there’s something wrong with me! I’m a Jew, a lonely Jew, on Christmas. — Kyle Broflovski, “South Park” Like many…
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Picturing the Holy City
Talk about the dustbin of history: In 1989, an American photographer happened upon a garage sale in St. Paul, Minn., and left with a box of the earliest-known photographs of Jerusalem from the 19th century. Taken by Mendel Diness, a Jewish watchmaker in Jerusalem, the photographs are currently on exhibit — along with shots by…
The Latest
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Seasonal Greetings
In our last installment, we looked at the most common of all Yiddish greetings, shoolem alaykhem, and its inevitable response, alaykhem shoolem. As with virtually all Yiddish greetings, alaykhem shoolem is often, though not inevitably, followed by a challenge in the form of nu, which has a basic meaning of “so” or “well,” as if…
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Would One Name a Teddy Bear ‘Jesus’?
Sometimes things you have wondered idly about for years find their solution unexpectedly in passing. This is what happened to me recently while following the story of the British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who was convicted in Sudan of the crime of letting her pupils call the class teddy bear “Mohammed.” My reflections on the fate…
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Music Yoko Ono’s Lens on the Holocaust
Yoko Ono has decided to donate a pair of eyeglasses to a Liverpool exhibit aimed at raising awareness of the Holocaust, and is also giving £10,000 to aid in the production of the event. According to the Liverpool Echo, several other celebrities, such as Stephen Fry, Ronnie Corbett and Jerry Springer, will be donating glasses…
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December 14, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward This week began with a giant whimper and not a bang, because of a new ruling that legally designates Sunday as a day of rest. And they mean it: Between the ultra-religious Catholicism of Judge O’Gorman and the club of Police Chief Bingham, nary a peep was heard out…
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Norman Finkelstein in Coney Island: ‘It’s Like Death’
New York magazine catches up with anti-Israel polemicist and now ex-academic Norman Finkelstein. Having been given the boot by DePaul University, it turns out he’s now living in Coney Island! Ben Harris reports for New York Magazine: At 54, Norman Finkelstein is pretty much back where he started. This summer, the leftist scholar—who made a…
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Eighth Night Yid Vid: The War on Christmas
The video’s maker explains: So, every year my school holds a door-decorating contest at Christmas time. This year, the plan was to have me make this Christmas vs. Hanukkah space battle animation, and play it on a laptop attached to the door, while also projecting a neat light effect onto some thin paper over the…
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Virtual Shul
In July 2007, the U.S. Department of Defense notified the Germans that in 2009, the American military base in Darmstadt, a landlocked city near Frankfurt, would be handed over to their government and the American military personnel there would be sent away. Thus began the end of an era in which this town has been…
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Was Hollywood’s Famed Censor an Antisemite?
‘These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence,” fumed Joseph I. Breen in a letter to the Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., editor of the Jesuit weekly America. The year was 1932, and the hot-tempered Irish Catholic, lately summoned to Hollywood, Calif., by motion picture czar Will H. Hays to convert…
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