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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Grant Rewards Innovation in Seattle
The Jewish community of Seattle is tapping into the city’s entrepreneurial spirit by taking a risk on innovative programs designed to transform local Jewish life. For the past three years, the Levitan Innovation Award has given $10,000 to a local organization with a creative program designed to increase Jewish engagement around Washington State’s Puget Sound….
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Fellowships Aim To Boost Jewish Studies Programs
The Foundation for Jewish Culture, in partnership with the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, recently announced the launch of the Jewish Studies Expansion Project, a pioneering program aimed at improving and diversifying Jewish studies course offerings at colleges and universities across the nation. The Schusterman Family Foundation has earmarked $1 million for a pilot…
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Students Donate Time and Money on ‘Alternative Breaks’
Winter vacations and spring breaks afford college students a chance to catch up on lost sleep or to work on their tans. But this year, growing numbers of Jewish students will donate some of their vacation time — as well as their money — to perform community service. A study conducted by the Charles and…
The Latest
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Program Helps Families Write New Chapter in Jewish Literacy
When country music legend Dolly Parton created the Imagination Library program 11 years ago, she began sending free books to young families in Tennessee to promote literacy. The program has grown enormously over the past decade, shipping books and educational materials to more than 330,000 children who otherwise might not have the opportunity to cultivate…
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After Bar Mitzvahs, Teens Keep Giving
Rebecca Schwartz was featured in the Forward’s Giving section three years ago, around the time of her bat mitzvah. Back then, she was one of the first to participate in Give a Mitzvah — Do a Mitzvah, a program that helps teenagers use their coming-of-age ceremony to help others. The program is still going strong:…
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Virtual Tzedakah Box Collects Real Dollars
For decades, Jews have dropped loose change in those tzedakah boxes found on countertops in Jewish stores and in Hebrew schools. Now, one person is modernizing this charitable act for the 21st century. Ben Vorspan, founder of Inspired Multimedia, launched MyJewishPortal.com three weeks ago as a community Web site that connects synagogues, organizations and individuals….
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November 2, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward For the second time, Yiddish theater director Jacob Gordin was denied all rights to the play “God, Man, and Devil” in New York’s Supreme Court. The judge also barred director David Kessler from casting actor Jacob Adler in the starring role. Gordin, who bought the play from Kessler in…
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Strangers in a Strange Land
Israeli cinema has made some notable strides over the past few years, thanks to a new generation of documentarians and the bohemian visions of the likes of Eytan Fox (“Walk on Water,” “The Bubble”) and Avi Nesher (the entertainingly ambitious “The Secret,” which may be the world’s first lesbian-Kabbalah-grrl power-yeshiva drama). These filmmakers have taken…
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A Life Torn Between Myth and Fact
Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life By Philip Davis Oxford University Press, 400 pages, $34.95. A writer both of the real and of great fantasy, Bernard Malamud was a man whose biography can be read in those two not necessarily contradictory ways: Realistically, he was a stooped, myopic, Brooklyn-born professor of literature who wrote various and…
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Trailblazing Book Reminds Us How Far We’ve Come
The 1950s cast a long shadow over contemporary America. Every week, or so it seems, we’re busy marking the 50th anniversary of one postwar phenomenon after another, from the birth of Levittown and the threat of Sputnik to the flowering of the civil rights movement. These bursts of historical consciousness are all to the good,…
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Two Israels, Unspooled
If a country’s movies are a barometer of its emotions (and they often are), the 59th year of the State of Israel has been a bummer. In the aftermath of a disastrous incursion into Lebanon, saddled with a do-nothing government, Israelis of all stripes are dismayed by their current state of affairs. And the movies…
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