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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Playing the Part of ‘Rav’ for San Francisco’s Karaite Community
By day, Joe Pessah is a marketing applications manager for a tech company in California’s Silicon Valley. In his spare time, however, the 62-year-old Mountain View resident pursues a much more unusual vocation. Pessah is the “acting rav” for America’s largest Karaite community, made up of members of a now-tiny Jewish sect that parted ways…
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Out of Egypt
Lucette Lagnado, a former editor at the Forward and currently a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, recently took it upon herself to unearth the full details of her family’s 1962 exodus from Egypt. The resulting book, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit” (Ecco), tells the story of a family torn from its beloved…
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The Death of Genuine Dissent
Last month, noted legal scholar Noah Feldman set off a firestorm of controversy with his screed against Modern Orthodox Judaism in the New York Times Magazine. The story has by now been hashed and rehashed in other newspapers, on blogs, in heated conversations: Feldman discovers, to his dismay, that he and his non-Jewish girlfriend were…
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City Boy
Leonard Michaels: Collected Stories Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 403 pages, $26. Melrose was the last kosher delicatessen in my Brooklyn neighborhood, Brighton Beach. It closed this past spring. Its window was shuttered, and a sign was hung, informing all that the business had moved to the Long Island suburb of Cedarhurst. After 1989, Brighton Beach,…
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Middle East Abattoir
Director Ami Dayan doesn’t want to start a rumble. Launching a New York production after a (relatively) small-town success in Boulder, Colo., is already enough of a campaign; he has nothing to gain from starting a ruckus, as well. So Dayan’s approach to the current remount of “Masked”— a play about Palestinians, written by Israeli…
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Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend
At a lecture that sculptor Louise Nevelson once gave at Queens College, a meticulous student raised her hand and offered her summary of Nevelson’s work. “Your work is black and it is wood and it is sculpture.” “If that’s what it appears like to you, then you’ve missed the whole thing,” Nevelson replied. The Jewish…
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Master of Reading
Gilad J. Gevaryahu writes to ask my opinion of a grammatical error in Hebrew that he noticed has been spreading in Orthodox religious circles in recent years. It goes back, he points out, to a mistake that was common in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, one that no longer seems mistaken to most people, because it has…
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When Vegetarians Were Rare
Now that “green” has gone mainstream, affecting the cars we drive, the homes we live in and, most especially, the determinedly pure, meatless food we put into our mouths, many Americans have taken to patting themselves on their backs for their eco-consciousness. To put things in healthy perspective, I’d like to suggest that we take…
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August 3, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward There is a great deal of talk these days about Sholem Asch’s new play, “God of Vengeance,” a tragic drama about a brothel owner whose daughter falls in love with one of his prostitutes. Most of this talk is taking place in the non-Jewish press, which is astounded not…
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Books Happy Birthday, Harry
Dutch writer Harry Mulisch turned 80 yesterday. “I have a theory that everybody has an absolute age which he will always have,” he said in an interview. “My absolute age is 17.”
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Music Who Lost Matisyahu?
It looks like the Lubavitchers did. The Hasidic reggae sensation recently told the Miami New Times: My initial ties were through the Lubovitch sect… I went to a Hasidic school for two years in Brooklyn. At this point, I don´t necessarily identify with it any more. I´m really religious, but the more I´m learning about…
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