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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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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Max Blumenthal, Scourge of Conservative Conferences
Max Blumenthal is a party pooper. Or, at least, you might feel that way if you were the organizer of a conservative conference and Blumenthal showed up with a video camera. The New York-based journalist is a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute (which is affiliated with the venerable left-wing magazine of the…
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August 10, 2007
100 Years Ago in the Forward Moroccan Pashas, unhappy with the French occupation of their country, ordered attacks on the European quarters of the Moroccan cities Casablanca and Mazagan. In response, French warships bombarded the Muslim quarters of these cities, inflicting much damage. Muslims decided to take vengeance on their Jewish neighbors, attacking the Jewish…
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Music Hitler’s Secret Record Collection: Did the Fuhrer Dig Jewish Musicians?
Say what you will about Hitler, he apparently had better taste in music than previously assumed. ABC News reports: “A new chapter about Hitler’s taste in classical music has now been opened on reports that suggest the German dictator and Holocaust mastermind may have actually had an ear for the works of Jewish and Russian…
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The Oracle of Prague
Just a few hours before I visited Lenka Reinerova in her Prague apartment, the Czech writer had gone through experimental radiation therapy for a cancer she has been battling since the 1940s. Reinerova lives alone, her only daughter hundreds of miles away in London, and I could imagine her feebly propping up her tiny 93-year-old…
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