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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Film To Break Silence Around Anorexia
Addressing a small audience of Orthodox Jews last month, Aliza Stareshefsky talked about the time in her life when she would make herself throw up after every meal. When she was struggling with her eating disorder 15 years ago, Stareshefsky said, very few people in the Orthodox community talked about anorexia or bulimia. “I thought…
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Web Site Provides Tools To Combat Bias on Campus
A recently launched Web site aimed at combating antisemitism on college campuses has generated “a huge and gratifying response,” according to Kenneth Marcus, staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. The commission launched the site — including information about what antisemitism is, what can be done about it and whom to contact…
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Professor Battles Preconceived Notions About Jews and Race
‘Most people, if they meet a white Jewish person, don’t ask that person, ‘How are you a Jew?’” said Lewis Gordon, a professor of philosophy at Temple University. “Most African American Jews face that all the time.” Gordon says he knows firsthand what it’s like “to have your legitimacy constantly challenged.” After all, he’s black…
The Latest
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Etiquette Maven Minds Your Manners
By day, Lorie Rudolph disguises herself as an unassuming insurance agent. “It has to pay the bills,” she said of her job. But come nights and weekends, the 53-year-old from Fayetteville, N.Y., transforms herself into the Jewish Etiquette Maven. Two years ago, Rudolph created an etiquette-training program, JewishEM, to teach children and young adults how…
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To Bore No More: Educators Share Their Best Ideas
Across the country, individual communities have developed initiatives aimed at improving Jewish congregational schools. Now, a new organization, the Partnership for Effective Learning and Innovative Education, is bringing together educators to help those communities share their most successful efforts. Rabbi Nathan Laufer, founding director of Pelie, said, “We are in business because there are hundreds…
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Donor Saves L.A. Yiddish Program
A major contribution from an anonymous donor will allow a pilot program that teaches Yiddish to Los Angeles high-school students to survive. Yiddishkayt Los Angeles, a not-for-profit organization devoted to furthering Yiddish in the area, recently received an unsolicited $250,000 gift earmarked for a program that aims to bring Yiddish-language classes into high schools. “It’s…
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Middlebury To Launch New School Of Hebrew
Visit Middlebury College’s language schools this summer, and you can cheer at a Portuguese soccer game, observe a Chinese cooking class or watch Russian television. Visit next summer, however, and you will be able to order falafel in Hebrew and dance to Israeli folksongs. Middlebury College and Brandeis University have teamed up to create the…
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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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