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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A Mighty Pen and a Humble Heart
In 1997, Saul Friedländer, a historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, published the first half of his chef-d’oeuvre, “Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939.” Writing in The New York Times Book Review, historian Fritz Stern praised the book for being at once evocative and rigorous. “He writes history with…
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Dramatizing the History of Indian Jews
Dropped From Heaven By Sophie Judah Schocken Books, 243 pages, $23. Members of the Bene Israel, the ancient Indian Jewish community, claim they are the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, that they escaped persecution in the Galilee in the second-century BCE, and that their ancestors were shipwrecked on the southern coast of…
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At 96, A Writer Is Born
Dropped From Heaven By Sophie Judah Schocken Books, 243 pages, $23. Walls and barriers have made front-page news lately. There’s the concrete wall going up between Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the reinforced fence along the United States-Mexico border. These recent developments make Harry Bernstein’s memoir, “The Invisible Wall,” especially pertinent. Bernstein, now 96…
The Latest
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Judaism’s Green Roots
An exciting Jewish environmental movement has been developing in recent years, with its foundations firmly established in tradition and modern environmental knowledge. The latest rung in this developing ladder is the publication of a new book by Jeremy Benstein, associate director of the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership. “A Way Into Judaism and…
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The Kitbag Question
Reporting on a visit by Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to Sderot, the town near Gaza repeatedly hit by Qassam rockets, the Hebrew newspaper Ha’aretz had this to say about her meeting there with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana: “In the course of a press conference…. Solana said that he understood the local…
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June 1, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Socialist comrade Sol Fieldman was arrested this week on charges of disturbing the peace. He was brought before the magistrate, who ordered him held on $100 bail. Fieldman, who has relentlessly disrupted Socialist Party meetings with attempts to force his own political agenda on the party, refused to pay…
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Dr. Ruth’s Other Interest: Ethnography
Ruth Westheimer is best known as “Dr. Ruth,” the tiny Jewish woman who dispenses sex advice in a distinctive German accent. But the renowned psychosexual therapist also happens to be an accomplished amateur ethnographer, having studied groups ranging from the Ethiopian Jews to Trobriand Islanders, often with a particular focus on family dynamics. Her latest…
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May 25, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward A pogrom is usually thought of as something that happens to Jews in Russia. But this week, in Sioux City, Iowa, a gang attacked a number of Jewish-owned stores in the middle of the night. When Philip Rubin heard the shattering of the large, plate-glass windows of his shoe…
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Writing in Four Dimensions
Avram Davidson was a midcentury, American writer of fantastic fiction whose imagination would inherit the galaxy, and more. His stories and novels of time travel and alternate universes transcended almost everything earthly, even as their author was bound to poverty and mainstream neglect. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction called Davidson the genre’s “most explicit literary…
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A Birthday Celebration for Curacao’s Historic Synagogue
As evening fell in Willemstad in Curacao on April 16, scores of well-dressed people headed to the narrow Hanchi di Snoa, and into the courtyard of the Snoa — Curacao’s venerable synagogue built in 1732, home to Congregation Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, the oldest surviving synagogue in the Americas, and one where no Sabbath or major holiday…
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Life After Death
Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life By Jon D. Levenson Yale University Press, 274 pages, $40. For many non-Orthodox Jews, the concept of the physical resurrection of the dead has always been difficult. Prayers mentioning the doctrine — including such central texts as the second paragraph of…
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