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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Building a Memorial From Strands of DNA
More than six decades after the victims of the Holocaust met their fateful end, a new genetically based initiative could give some of the departed the last respects they never received. The initiative, called the DNA Shoah Project, has as its goal the identification of human remains being unearthed in European towns and cities in…
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Artist Struggles To Overcome Pain With Paint
The canvases lining Ted Meyer’s studio seem too small for their contents. The jumbled skeletons they depict, upside-down and askew, resemble boxes full of bones dug up by an archaeologist and haphazardly stowed away for later scrutiny. The paintings, from a series that Meyer has named Structural Abnormalities, are themselves artifacts from a bygone age….
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Genetic Diseases? Yes. But Must We Call Them ‘Jewish’?
The extraordinary science of genetics, which is in the process of describing the very nature of our natures, is still in its infancy. The claims made for genetics, a science as narcissistic as any infant, generally outstrip the science’s ability to define or treat genetic illnesses. Yet there is an undeniable power in the notion…
The Latest
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Striking a Chord for Crohn’s Disease Research
As a member of the band Pearl Jam, the guitarist Mike McCready has played a good number of memorable concerts, but a recent show in Portland, Ore., hit especially close to home. The July 20 concert, at which Pearl Jam shared the stage with the indie-rock trio Sleater-Kinney and the comedian David Cross, was a…
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Greek Tragedy
The Jewish Community of Salonika: History, Memory, Identity By Bea Lewkowicz Vallentine Mitchell, 266 pages, $35. Traditions & Customs of the Sephardic Jews of Salonica By Michael Molho Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 432 pages, $29.95. The German occupation of Greece, begun in April 1941, was accompanied by organized plunder, rampant…
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New Book Reveals Darker Chapters In Hasidic History
Of all the literary genres to emerge from the 19th-century Haskala, or Hebrew Enlightenment, one of the most popular was anti-Hasidic satire. And the most notorious of these parodies was “Megaleh Temirin” (“Revealer of Secrets,” Vienna 1819), a ribald lampoon written by Joseph Perl that recounts a series of desperate, bungled attempts by fanatic Hasidim…
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August 25, 2006
100 Years Ago in the Forward: Exhausted and battered, a group of 30 orphans from the recent pogroms in the Bialystok area arrived on Ellis Island. Bearing deep scars from the tragedy they just went through, the children, who range in age from 2 1/2 to 20, lived through weeks of seeing their parents and…
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Dutch Team Investigates Cancer Risk
A team of researchers with the University of Amsterdam Academy Medical Center has rejected the notion that Jewish genetics are at the root of an increased risk of cancer among sufferers of Gaucher disease. Gaucher ? a fat-storage disease ? is found most commonly among Ashkenazic Jews. The medical community has known for more than…
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The Strange Journey Taken by Two Paintings
In 2002, an unusual advertisement in this newspaper caught subscriber Jack Nusan Porter’s eye: Two mysterious paintings, rendered by an unknown artist “at least 210 years” ago, were for sale. The paintings — which, as Porter later learned, were owned by a Ukrainian Jew named Alexander Goykham — had survived two centuries of anti-Jewish persecution,…
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Fiction About Israel
Two weeks ago, we asked readers to help us create a list of the best novels and short stories about Israel written by diaspora authors. The purpose was to push fiction as a complement to the newspaper, the television and the Internet in our quest for information and understanding about Israel. Below, your suggestions, along…
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Mozart’s Librettist Gets the Stage
An even better Mozart-motivated movie than “Amadeus” has yet to be made. The subject: Wolfgang’s magnificent collaborator, Lorenzo Da Ponte, the libertine librettist of “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così fan tutte” — arguably Mozart’s greatest works, and watersheds in the history of music and theater, not to mention humanity. The episodic cinematic…
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