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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From Berlin to Buffalo
Growing up in the 1940s, when my family members and I were still relatively new Americans, there were various German words I heard often around the house: Sicherheitsnadel (safety pin) — my mother always seemed to be looking for one. Füllfederhalter (fountain pen) — my father was very devoted to Parker pens. Wickelkommode (changing table)…
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Encyclopaedia Judaica 2.0
When the philosopher Denis Diderot set out, in 1750, to compile the French Encyclopédie — a work whose goal, he later said, was to “assemble the knowledge scattered over the surface of the earth” — he boldly announced that the project’s 10 envisioned volumes would be in readers’ hands in just four years’ time. The…
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January 19, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Mixed marriages are all the rage nowadays. We’ve recently received numerous letters from Jewish men and women who have married non-Jews and live their lives quite happily. There’s no point in getting agitated either for or against the phenomenon; the masses always do what they want. They can scream…
The Latest
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Doors Open for Disabled Kids
Each week, Michelle Alkon tried to light Shabbat candles with her family. But each week, when her son Ben saw the burning candles he would sing “Happy Birthday” and blow them out. “I wanted to have a happy Jewish home, [but] after week after week of trying to teach him that [Shabbat] was a special…
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Preschoolers Get a Head Start in Hebrew
Los Angeles – Jewish day-school educators have long been flummoxed by the fact that, despite their best efforts to teach Hebrew, the vast majority of students graduate with little grasp of the language. In this city, that story is finally changing. Some four years since the launch of a pilot program to teach Hebrew at…
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New Curriculum Shines Spotlight On the Torah’s Heroic Women
When the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance wanted to see more women included in Orthodox day-school lessons, the group started at the beginning — the very beginning. JOFA’s gender-sensitive curriculum, titled “Bereishit: A New Beginning,” focuses on the matriarchs in the Book of Genesis. Intended to supplement, not supplant, existing day-school curricula, “Bereishit” is now being…
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Day Schools Seek Solutions to Leadership Crisis
First, the good news: The number of students in Jewish day schools has risen 11% nationwide in the past five years, and 83 new schools have opened their doors in the same period. Now the bad news: There are not enough heads of school to lead these educational institutions. Across the religious spectrum, Jewish day…
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Agency’s CEO Brings His Ideas to Think Tank
After two decades as president and chief executive officer of the Jewish Education Service of North America, Jonathan Woocher is taking a new position this month as the organization’s chief ideas officer. Woocher will also become the director of the Lippman Kanfer Institute, Jesna’s recently founded think tank. The Jewish community has “a lot of…
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Jewish Studies Take Off, North of the Border
‘Thirty years ago, the Jewish community of Canada was not a subject for winning tenure at a university,” said Ira Robinson, professor of Judaic studies at Montreal’s Concordia University. Now, all over Canada, scholarly journals, academic conferences, university institutes and endowed professorships are cropping up around a subject that might have seemed parochial a generation…
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Ladino Professor Keeps a Language — and Her Heritage — Alive
Among the hundreds of panels convened at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in San Diego last month was the impishly titled “Is Ladino Dead Yet?” The panelists came from wildly divergent backgrounds and scholarly orientations, but on the central question of whether or not the Sephardic language has expired, their answer was a unanimous…
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Group Teaches Teenage Girls Positive Messages
Rosh Hodesh, the monthly Jewish celebration of the new moon, has a special significance for teenage girls around the country. “Rosh Hodesh: It’s a Girl Thing!” is a program designed to counter the onslaught of negative messages broadcast to American girls through the media, using monthly group meetings to strengthen adolescent girls’ Jewish identity and…
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