Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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The towering Jewish critic who taught me to grok art and hate Picasso
After Max Kozloff died at 91, a New York community came together to remember and to mourn
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A Demanding Composer Meets His Orchestral Match
In between rehearsals at the Metropolitan Opera, composer Tobias Picker laughingly recalled another opera orchestra — which shall remain nameless — whose violinists, protesting his penchant for writing in the instruments’ extreme range, greeted him in rehearsal in mock submission, waving white handkerchiefs on the end of their bows. Nothing of the sort awaits him…
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A Tale of Two Trains
I am on a train heading into Magdeburg in eastern Germany, an hour or so from Berlin. Sixty-one years ago, my late mother was on a train headed for Magdeburg. Hers didn’t have a dining car or changing electronic displays updating the train’s speed and distance from its next station. She was one of hundreds…
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A Ladino Singer Rebels –– With Flamenco
Yasmin Levy should be a very happy woman. The Jerusalem-born singer is perhaps the most visible and popular performer of contemporary Ladino music. Critics gushed over her 2001 debut album, “Romance & Yasmin,” and well-received performances at the World of Music, Arts & Dance festivals in Singapore and Madrid in 2004 and 2005 have garnered…
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Inward Bound: State, Faith and the Jews
The Jewish Prison: A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism By Jean Daniel, translated by Charlotte Mandell Melville House, 214 pages, $14.95. * * *| In “The Jewish Prison: A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism,” an often impassioned, sometimes contradictory and always very French essay, Jean Daniel argues that contemporary Jews have…
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Entitlements
He is a boy of 8 or 9, sweeping out the entry to the master’s house. He hears his master, Abraham, within, speaking to someone he cannot see, worried that, as the only male born into the household, “this Eliezer of Damascus” might become heir to the household. It took him some moments to divine…
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South African Challah?
Michael Cole from Toronto writes: “My wife’s South African relatives refer to a Shabbat or festival challah as a ‘kitke.’ This seems to be a uniquely South African term, unknown, as far as I am aware, even among other people of Lithuanian descent. [Mr. Cole is referring to the fact that South African Jewry originated…
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A Life at Arm’s Length
Abraham was the perfect host. So was his nephew, Lot, the one who lived to the east, near the plains of Jordan. Those Terah boys come down from Ur of the Chaldees to Canaan and Haran and back again may have left their father’s houses with only a few possessions, but they packed etiquette in…
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Why Are There So Many Jewish Feminists?
This was originally posted online November 18, 2005, updated 20 Nov 2018. The Jewish Women’s Archive recently launched an online exhibit called Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, which uses a timeline, interviews and scans of historical artifacts to look at the contributions of Jewish feminists to Jewish and American history. (You can see it…
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Looking Back November 18, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD In a private letter provided to the Forward by a resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the current pogroms in Russia are described: “Ten thousand people have been killed and wounded; children were thrown off of tall buildings; the bellies of pregnant women were cut open… the hospitals are…
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Saying Adios to a Jewish Book Series
In 1996, I received an invitation from Dana Asbury at the University of New Mexico Press to develop a series devoted to Jewish Latin America. I was entranced by the idea. Having come of age in the Mexico of the late 1960s and ’70s, I had made up my mind, in my early 20s, to…
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Seeing Stars
Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish By Abigail Pogrebin Broadway, 400 pages, $24.95. * * *| In 1994, comedian Adam Sandler evoked the joys of counting Jewish celebrities with his hilarious ditty, “The Hanukkah Song.” Now, journalist Abigail Pogrebin is taking it one step further. Unwilling to settle for a mere headcount,…
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