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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Nonprofits Mull Staff Shortages
After years of working with some of the most promising organizations in the rapidly expanding field of Jewish nonprofits, the staff at one of America’s largest Jewish family foundations noticed a disturbing trend: While dynamic and creative groups were cropping up everywhere, injecting Jewish communal life with renewed passion and commitment, the people needed to…
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Community’s ‘Other Fifth’ Needs Help
In a desolate room on the fifth floor of a rundown Soviet-bloc style apartment building in Kishinev, Moldova, resides Klara Kogan. She is 100 years old, has not left her room in five years and has no living relative on the face of the earth. Yet she holds in her room the key to Jewish…
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Rockers Make Dreams a Reality — For Kids in America and in Africa
Lots of kids dream of singing in a rock ’n’ roll band. Not many dream of helping other kids in an impoverished country. Thirteen-year-old Raechel Rosen dreamed of both. Rosen and four male friends formed a band called Creation in 2003 — when all the members were in the fifth grade. Creation performs original upbeat…
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Businessman Donates His Millions To Educational Projects
The $25 million gift that Lorry Lokey gave this summer to Technion-Israel Institute of Technology sounds impressive. But it’s even more impressive that Lokey — founder and chairman of Business Wire — makes gifts of similar sizes to educational institutions on a regular basis. Lokey, 79, estimated that he has given away more than $325…
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Youth Philanthropy Movement Gains Momentum
‘Charity is right up my alley,” said Sara Goldstein, who volunteers at a hospital near her home in Scottsdale, Ariz., and teaches Hebrew school at her local synagogue. So when the time came for Goldstein’s bat mitzvah, it was only natural for her to set aside $180 of her gifts to donate to charity. But…
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Designer Strikes Gold for Charities
Fashionably dressed, with her shiny graying hair grown long, jewelry designer Joan Hornig seems to have a permanent smile on her face as she flits around her tall glass display case at Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It is not unusual for Hornig to engage the high-end department store’s shoppers in conversation while…
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Funding Fuels Group Homes’ Growth
Call it a throwback to communal housing in Berkeley in the 1960s. Or a Jewish take on the long-running MTV reality show “The Real World,” where a bunch of strangers in their 20s are housed under one roof. Or something in between. Whatever the comparison, Moishe Houses, group homes for young Jews who have finished…
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Nonprofit CEO Focuses on Social Justice
As a young labor organizer in the late 1990s, Simon Greer was particularly fond of a certain motto often recited by his boss: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” But having grown up without any ties to the organized Jewish community, Greer was unaware that the quotation is part of…
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Giving is a Family Tradition For ‘Venture Philanthropist’
‘I am very interested in getting the biggest bang for my buck,” Alice Rosenwald told the Forward recently. “When I invest, I want to make a difference.” Rosenwald, who appears in this week’s Forward 50, is co-chair of American Securities Holdings, a merchant and investment bank with a history of developing innovative investment businesses by…
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Probing Brown’s Dark History
Last month, Brown University released the results of a three-year study of its historical relationship to slavery and the slave trade, and suggested several steps to inform the public about this dark chapter in its past, including the creation in Rhode Island of a memorial to the slave trade. Surprisingly, although the report has a…
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Reinventing Politics, With Language
Rituals of Truce and the Other Israeli By Benjamin Hollander Parrhesia Press, 137 pages, $12.95. Vigilance By Benjamin Hollander Beyond Baroque Books, 220 pages, $12. ‘This is the time for political invention,” writes Benjamin Hollander halfway through “Rituals of Truce and the Other Israeli,” his imaginative meditation on the impasse between the Israelis and Palestinians:…
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