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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Defining the ‘WikiJew’
Who is a Jew? Let’s see what Wikipedia says about it. Or, rather, what the Wikipedias say, since the online encyclopedia is available in more than 100 languages. The answer to our question in English neither offends nor omits anyone: “[A] follower of Judaism, or [a member] of the Jewish people, an ethno-religious group descended…
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The Iconic Blue Box Gets a Makeover
When Yael Golan’s mother was a girl in Uruguay, she’d drop a few coins into the Keren Kayemet box every Friday at her Jewish day school and sing a little song: “Dunam by dunam, shekel by shekel, building the land of Israel.” Recently, 35 years after immigrating to Israel, Golan’s mother sang that song again,…
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November 10, 2006
100 Years Ago in the forward This past Tuesday night, the largest crowd in the city planted itself in front of the Forward building to hear the election results as they came in. Estimated at 20,000 people, the crowd packed Seward Park and the streets surrounding the area. At about 9 p.m., as the people…
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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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