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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Curating Casablanca
A t first glance — given the recent history of Jews in Arab lands — the statistics for Morocco’s Jewish community are unsurprising, even if startling. A population of roughly 265,000 in 1948 has dwindled to merely 5,000, as most Moroccan Jews have immigrated to Israel, Europe and North America. Yet Morocco, almost an entire…
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Where the Borscht Sounds Like the Sea
What a great idea! Most people who know of Woody Guthrie associate him with Dust Bowl ballads of economic hardship, or with the lefty patriotism of “This Land Is Your Land” (like many such songs, its political bite has been dulled by repetition). But not many know that, from 1942 until his slow decline into…
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The Bloody History Of a Disastrous Libel
Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840 By Ronald Florence Other Press, 272 pages, $15.95. ‘It is obvious to me… that you killed him to take his blood and that that’s your custom. Don’t you know about the expulsion from Spain and other expulsions, and about the thousands of Jews killed because of this issue?…
The Latest
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Inspired by Henson — and Schneerson
Dovid Taub has two main inspirations: Jim Henson and the Lubavitcher rebbe. Through his ability to knit threads of holiness and ancient kabbalistic wisdom into the fabric of his puppetry, Taub has created a comedy sitcom to which fellow Hasidim return every week. The “Itche Kadoozy Show” features a Hasidic rabbi and his troublemaking young…
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Paying Tribute to a Living Legend
Novelist, story-writer and memoirist Jakov Lind turns 80 on February 10. No longer a refugee and no longer writing, for the past decade he’s been unwillingly rooted in London, slowly dying from a motor neuron disease. He is scandalously under-read in his native Austria, and ignobly neglected, too, in the countries of his second written…
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February 2, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward The first Yiddish theater school has opened its doors in New York City on East Broadway. Run by M.J. Lavrovsky, a graduate of the Moscow School of Drama, the Titakoni Drama School offers courses in acting, singing, dancing, elocution, physical culture and more, all taught by experienced performers from…
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The Jewish McLuhan
The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness By Mel Alexenberg Intellect, 187 pages, $60. As a wakeup call to “an indifferent world” and “Jews with their heads in the sand,” Mel Alexenberg designed a Holocaust memorial to honor the 6 million Jews in Israel “incinerated by an Iranian nuclear…
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A Historian-Soldier Bridges His Identities
Sitting on a stage in a mahogany-paneled study of the townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that contains the venerable Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Oren, the historian, was getting frustrated with the questions the standing room-only audience was lobbing at him. He had come to talk about his new book, a history of America’s…
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Bible Wars
Now that Christmas has come and gone, we’re apt to think that pitched discussions about religion in the public square (all those crèches and Christmas trees and menorahs and overwrought television commentators like you-know-who) are a seasonal affair. But if history teaches anything, it’s that these discussions are always with us. I’d even go a…
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Free Speech at City College
In early October 2001, the City College of New York’s faculty union, alarmed by what it saw as a wave of jingoism unleashed by the 9/11 attacks, decided to stage a teach in. Titled “Threats of War, Challenges of Peace,” the session was seen in some quarters as unpatriotic, seditious even. The New York Post…
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Jewish Book Award Winners
The following are the winners of the 2006 National Jewish Book Awards, announced last week by the Jewish Book Council: JEWISH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD “A Code of Jewish Ethics, Vol. 1: You Shall Be Holy” Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (Crown Publishing Group) . AMERICAN JEWISH STUDIES “Emma Lazarus” Esther Schor (Schocken/Nextbook) . ANTHOLOGIES AND…
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