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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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,…
The Latest
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Israel Museum Donation
The photography department of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, recently received a $12 million gift from long-standing New York-based patrons Harriette and Noel Levine. The gift — the largest monetary donation that a visual-arts institution has ever received — will permit the museum’s already established photography department to conduct research and publish books and literature. The…
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Teach Your Children Well: Tzedaka Restores Justice
The word tzedaka, often translated as “charity,” comes from the Hebrew root tzedek, meaning “justice.” Its current usage was developed by the early rabbis, who recognized that the distribution of resources that results from a free-market economy must be adjusted by other means to ensure a fair society. Tzedaka is an expression of justice rather…
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The Young Face of Philanthropy
Jewish teenagers are learning that tzedaka involves more than slipping a few coins into the collection box at synagogue. In innovative programs around the country, teens are being given control over thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars in an effort to teach them the ins and outs of philanthropy — from reading budgets…
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Birthright Israel Builds a Solid Foundation
Birthright Israel is only six years old, but it already has established itself as one of the most successful programs in the Jewish world. Steps are now being taken to make it a permanent part of the Jewish landscape. When Birthright was founded by a handful of innovative philanthropists, “it was an experiment,” said Charles…
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Joshua Venture: Gone for Good, or Ready for a Fresh Start?
After helping to launch some of the Jewish world’s most buzzed-about fledgling organizations in recent years, Joshua Venture closed its doors last spring after only five years of operation. As supporters evaluate exactly what went wrong, some of the group’s major funders have already moved on to new projects. Nonetheless, there is still a chance…
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Rabbi Sets a Message to Music
Shawn Zevit is practicing what he preaches. A Philadelphia-based Reconstructionist rabbi who serves as a visiting rabbi at Pittsburgh’s Congregation Dor Hadash, Zevit is also a singer, songwriter and guitarist with two full-length CDs to his credit. With musical influences ranging from The Beatles to indie rock, from soul to R&B, Zevit’s new album, “Sanctuary,”…
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Mem Bernstein
MEM BERNSTEIN In 2002, Bernstein made our list as one of the most dynamic, if most media-shy, Jewish “venture philanthropists.” As a string of recent successes attest, her influence has only grown in the past three years. Bernstein oversees not one but two major foundations. Both were started with the money of her late husband,…
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Playing Fill-in-the-Blanks With a Father’s Life
Not Me By Michael Lavigne Random House, 320 pages, $24.95. Between what one is told and what one is able to infer, there lies a distant and beckoning truth: the Parent as Human Being. It glimmers beyond our grasp, always sought after but never obtained, the object of conjecture but never of understanding. For some,…
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Confessions
We human beings have a special adaptive mechanism called rationality. It allows us to prognosticate. We say “If A, then B.” If we wish to change B, perhaps we might change A. This is the good news. The bad news is that we are incapable of perceiving situations otherwise than as the syntheses of thesis…
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