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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Early Hitler, Late Mailer
The Castle in the Forest By Norman Mailer Random House, 496 pages, $27.95. What to say about what might be Norman Mailer’s last novel, except to voice hope for a novel that might’ve been better? Or maybe to ask the gods to give him more time — another year or two, or 10 — to…
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January 26, 2007
100 Years Ago In the Forward Meyer Schwartz, 17, and 16-year-old Gussie Kling, both of New York City, killed themselves in a suicide pact after their parents refused to give them permission to marry. The two were cousins and grew up around the corner from each other, Schwartz on Broome Street and Kling on Orchard…
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Teddy’s Town
The evening after Teddy Kollek lost his last race for mayor of Jerusalem in 1993, after 28 years at the city’s helm, I sat in an Arabic language class at the Hebrew University. The teacher, a Muslim from East Jerusalem, asked his students, a motley assemblage of young, chatty left-wingers, retirees and barrel-chested young men…
The Latest
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Animating Hasidism
Ukraine, 1876: In the shtetl of Lubavitch, a scribe named Sammy Harkham procrastinates at his job inking mezuzas, bickers with his wife and tries to avoid his disapproving rabbi. Los Angeles, 2006: The tribulations of Ukrainian Sammy Harkham are the subject of a serial comic strip called “Lubavitch,” created by a punk-rock-loving 26-year-old also named…
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Sex and Survival on The Lower East Side
In 1966, the Jewish Daily Forward serialized Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish novel, “Sonim, de Geshichte fun a Leib,” a tale of the psychological and sexual neuroses of Holocaust survivor Herman Cohen in 1940s New York, and those of the female company he keeps. The story was later published as “Enemies, A Love Story” and then…
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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…
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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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