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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Annual Guide to Jewish Genetic Diseases
The Forward presents this section to provide information on some of the more serious Jewish genetic diseases. There are about 20 “Ashkenazic diseases,” not counting the higher rates of at least four cancer-related genes. The diseases are more prevalent in the Eastern European Jewish population because of centuries of endogamy — literally, “marrying within.” Bloom’s…
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A Persian Josef K.
The Septembers of Shiraz By Dalia Sofer Ecco Books, 340 pages, $24.95. At its outset, Dalia Sofer’s novel, “The Septembers of Shiraz,” seems destined to be “The Trial: Tehran,” the story of a man wrongfully arrested and very belatedly informed of his supposed crime. But Sofer’s protagonist, Isaac Amin, is no Josef K., who comparatively…
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August 17, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Last night, as 14-year-old Joseph Mintzer was playing with his friends in front of his building at 42 Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a car came whizzing by, smashing into Mintzer and flinging his body far down the sidewalk. Hundreds of Jews came out onto the street…
The Latest
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Funny, Brad Greenberg Doesn’t Look Christian
It’s not surprising that a major Jewish newspaper would have its own “God Blog.” One might be surprised, however, upon learning that a Jewish newspaper’s “God blogger” is a church-going Christian. And one certainly wouldn’t expect said Christian to have a last name that starts with “Green” and ends with “berg.” Meet Brad A. Greenberg,…
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Israel’s Divine Poets
CREATOR, ARE YOU LISTENING? ISRAELI POETS ON GOD AND PRAYER Edited by David C. Jacobson Indiana University Press, 264 pages, $34.95 In an interview, Yehuda Amichai once mentioned that some congregations in America had started to use his poems as tefillot, or prayers, in a synagogue setting. This left him pleased (why not?) but also…
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She’s Still Got the Beat
When it comes to assessing the lives and careers of older female musicians, certain ready-made narratives spring to mind. There’s the promising career cut short by sexual discrimination. The veteran performer who never gets her due. And the lucky outlier who makes it to the top of the heap despite impossible odds. We want to…
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Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed
In “Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed” (Six Gallery Press), writer Joshua Cohen, a literary critic for the Forward, and artist Michael Hafftka reinterpret the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in form and in function, in manners both mundane and mystical: The letter hey becomes a hat; the letter yod is said to represent…
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The Sister She Never Knew
Two months ago, Yad Vashem published the diary of Rutka Laskier, a Jewish girl from Poland who, at the age of 14, died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Over the course of a few months in 1943, Rutka kept a diary while living in a ghetto in the town of Bedzin, about 20 miles from…
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Noahide Pause
Irwin Mortman writes: “I have been trying to determine why the suffix ‘ide’ was added to the name Noah to create the adjective ‘Noahide.’ I need the answer to this query since I will be moderating a class where the ‘Noahide laws’ will be discussed, and I am sure someone will ask me why a…
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Brit Lit
This may seem hard for American readers to believe, but we British Jews rarely get to see ourselves reflected in contemporary fiction. While you’ve all spent the past several decades fairly swimming in successful American Jewish fiction — beginning in 1959 with Philip Roth’s debut and lasting right until this year, which has seen works…
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Israel, Stripped
Photographer Ofir Ben Tov approaches Israel from a lofty perch: the sky. His aerial images create a narrative that connects the biblical sages to modern-day Israelis through the trees, mountains and oceans that have always been there, bearing witness to our complicated history. Ben Tov has devoted himself to aerial art ever since he photographed…
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