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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Dennis Ross’s Diplomacy 101
Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World By Dennis Ross Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages, $26. When the diplomatic history of the Bush administration is written, it will likely be little more than a catalog of lost opportunities, punctuated only occasionally by a muted victory won only after a series of…
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The Masculine Mystique
In Roy Rub’s new work, “Promise Lands,” the artist and typographer uses old advertisements to engage with the process of leaving one promised land (Israel) for another (New York). In “Promise Lands,” Rub compares the American cowboy, particularly the Marlboro man, with the Israeli pilot. Both are “cool,” iconic has-beens. “My Son the Pilot” is…
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Writing About Other Writers
Last week, Joshua Cohen began his review of Leonard Michaels’s “Collected Stories” by praising Michaels’s first collection, “Going Places.” This week, he concludes with a look at Michaels’s second collection, and “The Nachman Stories.” If you missed the first part, click here. Leonard Michaels: The Collected Stories Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pages, $26. Leonard…
The Latest
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The Truth About Einstein’s Boat
Marjorie Wolfe read the same article in The New York Times that I did. The article, captioned “At relativity, a genius; as a sailor, not so much: Recalling Einstein’s summer of 1939,” was based on an interview with Long Island resident David Rothman, whose father owned a general store in Cutchogue Harbor that Albert Einstein…
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Carrot and Shtick
For many years of my life, I worried about American poetry and German philosophy. Now that I have kids, I worry about more pressing things. Like religion. Like ethnicity. Like cartoons. Since it’s August, and everyone is on vacation, my editor is feeling more permissive than usual. It seems like a good time to pose…
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Sands of Time: The Oregon Coast
An Ocean View: Vacations at the Oregon Coast, an exhibit running until September 23 at the Oregon Jewish Museum, transports the viewer to the sun-streaked Oregon shores, where American and Jewish cultures have long converged. Inspired by the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s 2005 installment, “The Other Promised Land: Vacationing, Identity, and the Jewish-American Dream,” the…
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Book Center Turns New Page
Twenty-seven years ago, the oft-repeated story goes, a scruffy college student named Aaron Lansky launched a mission to save Yiddish books. Unable to bear the thought of thousands of books being thrown away by an aging generation of Jewish immigrants and their Yiddish-illiterate offspring, Lansky founded the not-for-profit National Yiddish Book Center to complete the…
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Hands-On Workshops Spice Up Classes
Every year, nursery school students at the Hebrew Academy of Morris County, a community day school in Randolph, N.J., put down their pencils and crayons and spend a few hours learning about Judaism in a more unusual way. Sometimes, they dive into bowls of flour and water and make homemade matzo, and other times they…
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Fla. Charter School Fuels Church-State Debate
America’s first Hebrew-English charter school is scheduled to open this month — following widespread public debate over its curriculum. The Ben Gamla Charter School in Hollywood, Fla., will welcome approximately 430 students, from kindergarten through eighth grade, on August 20. Children at the bilingual school will spend two hours each day learning Hebrew, with words…
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Teachers Take Their Lessons Behind Bars for Jewish Prisoners
Rabbinical students Yisroel Silverstein of Brooklyn and Reuven Brody of Miami Beach, Fla., with their black hats and beards, must have looked out of place this summer on “The Farm.” The Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La., which earned its nickname because it is still a working farm, is the largest and perhaps most infamous…
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‘Front-Loading’ Campaign Offers a Novel Model for Fundraising
An innovative form of fundraising for Jewish day schools in Chicago has met with great success, and may become a model for future fundraising efforts across the country. The idea is called “front-loading.” Under this arrangement, major donors pledge to donate a certain amount to the local Jewish federation over the next 10 years. The…
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