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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When Rites Go Wrong
Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933 By Robin Judd One of the historian’s most important tasks is to teach us things we do not know. One significant form this can take is to complicate our understanding of the past by helping us re-imagine how events unfolded. It is too…
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As Winter Falls, a Time To Learn From the Orthodox
As daylight-saving time ends and the winter approaches in earnest, Shabbat begins to be inconvenient again. In the northeastern United States, it now begins at four, even three in the afternoon Friday, early enough to encroach on the workday, and render the day a little bit useless. For families with children, the Sabbath now starts…
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Director Focuses on the Legacy of Muslim Slavery
‘The Film Class” could be the most important small film that almost nobody will ever see. Set in the Bedouin town of Rahat in the Israeli Negev, the film, which was shown earlier this month at the Boston Jewish Film Festival and at The Other Israel Film Festival in New York, follows Israeli filmmaker Uri…
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A Domestic Portrait, With Voices Hushed
Matrimony By Joshua Henkin Pantheon Books, 304 pages, $23.95. Not a great deal actually happens in “Matrimony,” the new novel by Joshua Henkin. Julian Wainwright, a WASP from Manhattan, meets Mia Mendelsohn, a Jewish girl from Montreal, at Graymont College, a fictional liberal-arts school. The narrative follows the couple from their awkward, charming undergraduate romance…
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Back to the Lower East Side
After 20 years of renovation, the Eldridge Street Synagogue, a National Historic Landmark, is now open to the public. The Eldridge Street Project’s restoration campaign is set to finish just before a second inauguration this week, capping an $18 million effort that brought together support from the City of New York and more than 18,000…
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A Condi Conundrum
Writing last week in The New York Times, Israel correspondent Steven Erlanger remarked that preparations for the Annapolis, Md., summit have contributed a new verb to the Hebrew language: Le’kandel, “to come and go for meetings that produce few results,” coined from the first name of Condoleezza Rice. I myself have yet to encounter le’kandel…
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November 23, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Not long ago, it was reported in a number of newspapers that conditions for workers in the South were terrible and not entirely dissimilar from the conditions during which slavery was the dominant form of employment. As organizations such as the Jewish Territorialist Organization were sending Jewish immigrants to…
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Yid Vid: A Marxist Take on the Writers’ Strike
Groucho not Karl. Hat tip: Jewschool.
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They’re Building It, but Will They Come?
In a groundbreaking study released last spring, social scientists Steven M. Cohen and Ari Kelman reached a novel and, for some, startling conclusion: Far from being indifferent to Jewish cultural life, young unaffiliated Jews are actually quite interested in attending Jewish events — provided they are being offered outside the walls of Jewish venues. Young…
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Israel’s Jazz Messengers
No one who has bought a Pesek Zman chocolate bar in the East Village or eavesdropped on a Hebrew conversation on the Upper West Side would be surprised to learn that New York City has a healthy Israeli expatriate community. But how many know that Israelis have come to occupy a prominent place on the…
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Saul Bellow on God
This month, Vintage Books published “Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion,” by cultural critic Antonio Monda. In it, Monda offers a collection of dialogues between himself and a host of boldface names — including Martin Scorsese, Paul Auster, Jane Fonda, Spike Lee and Elie Wiesel. Our favorite, though, is Monda’s 2002 conversation with…
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