Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Left Out?
Over a seven-month period in the fall of 2004, filmmakers and activists Konnie Chameides and Irit Reinheimer crisscrossed America, crashed on people’s couches and interviewed more than 60 of their fellow Jewish social activists working outside of the mainstream. The resulting documentary, “Young, Jewish and Left,” explores the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, Zionism and…
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Excavating the Old Jewish New York
Beginning November 9, the Bronfman Center for Jewish Life at New York University will host an exhibit of photographs by Forward contributor Julian Voloj, titled “Forgotten Heritage: Uncovering New York’s Hidden Jewish Past.” (The exhibit opens on Thursday with a reception celebrating the publication of PresenTense magazine, to which Voloj also contributes.) An immigrant from…
The Latest
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Setting the Beat for a New Generation of Jews
What a difference four years can make. In 2002, Aaron Bisman was a 22-year-old New York University graduate with the unlikeliest of goals: to nurture a Jewish community through music. Four years later, Bisman, along with his partner, Ben Hesse, sits at the helm of one of the most promising ventures in contemporary Jewish culture:…
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The Rise of David Levinsky
This month, the Downtown Kehillah, which is a consortium of 17 Manhattan synagogues and Jewish organizations, together with the Forward present the first-ever downtown Jewish community book club. Beginning October 16 and continuing through December 16, some 4,000 people will be reading “The Rise of David Levinsky,” the 1917 tour de force, set in downtown…
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October 27, 2006
100 Years Agoin the Forward The Russian government suddenly has decided to strictly enforce the law that restricts all Jews to live within the limits of the Pale of Settlement. Oddly enough, this enforcement comes after discussion in the government to abolish the Pale. It also follows an announcement that peasants no longer will be…
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Creator Remorse
The creation of the world in the first chapters of Genesis happens quickly and with seemingly little effort. God merely has to speak, and the sky, the earth, the seas — entities that have formed the basis of human curiosity and contemplation — snap into place. In just seven days, according to this version of…
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Talking Cure?
Prisoners: A Muslim & a Jew Across the Middle East Divide By Jeffrey Goldberg Knopf, 320 pages, $25. The irreducible element at the end of every Israeli-Arab argument is always psychology. Looking at a map, any two reasonable partners could easily delineate the borders. Even the impasses over refugees and settlements, even Jerusalem, seem at…
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Boxing Writing That Pulls No Punches
Ringside: A Treasury of Boxing Reportage By Budd Schulberg Ivan R. Dee, 368 pages, $27.50. Back in the early 1990s, The New York Times asked if I might be interested in leaving my football beat to become the boxing writer. The decision was easy — boxing had always been the most lyrical beat in the…
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Yet Another Look At Bashevis
Isaac B. Singer: A Life By Florence Noiville Translated from the French by Catherine Temerson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 181 pages, $24. By now, the English-speaking world’s embrace of the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer should be evident to all. Beginning in 1953, when his story “Gimpel the Fool,” translated by Saul Bellow, was published…
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When Reality Overwhelms Creativity
Awake in the Dark By Shira Nayman Scribner, 304 pages, $24. ‘Awake in the Dark,” Shira Nayman’s collection of short stories about American children of Holocaust survivors, is being launched into the chain stores with the highest of book-club hopes. The publisher’s press release features praise from Ursula Hegi (“brilliant and mystical stories”), and printed…
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Il Duce’s Own Idea
The Jews In Mussolini’s Italy from Equality to Persecution By Michele Sarfatti The University of Wisconsin Press, 419 pages, $57.30. In 1934, Benito Mussolini famously declared that “there has never been antisemitism in Italy.” A mere four years later, after abandoning his Jewish mistress of 27 years, he passed his infamous racial laws. Michele Sarfatti’s…
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