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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Talking Books Help Kids Learn To Read
In the first passage of a grade-school primer called “The Little Midrash Says,” Moses assembles the Children of Israel one last time before his death to make a speech, because he knows he will not survive their trek to the promised land. “I will repeat the Torah and mitzvos to them, and I will make…
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Hebrew Students Earn Credit
When Katie Melchior received her diploma this summer from San Diego’s Westview High School, her transcript showed that she had fulfilled the foreign-language requirement for her local school district by taking three years of Hebrew. Westview, however, doesn’t offer Hebrew classes; its foreign-language courses are limited to Spanish and French. Instead, Melchior studied the language…
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Meditation Hits the Jewish Mainstream
On any given morning at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston, a group of seventh- and eighth-graders can be found lying quietly beside one another on old baby quilts, basking in the stillness of meditation. New Age music plays softly in the background, while their teacher leads them through a series of calming…
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The Capitol Gang
The recipe for a successful reality television series is relatively straightforward. Take a bunch of young, attractive coeds, cram them into a tight space and stoke their competitive instincts with a common challenge that demands both teamwork and individual distinction. Set up a camera, and voilá: instant drama, or, at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof….
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The Roots of a ‘Special Relationship’
Eye on Israel: How America Came To View Israel As An Ally By Michelle Mart SUNY Press, 242 pages, $65. In recent years, numerous commentators have sought to explain the “special relationship” between Israel and America and the reasons for it. Some observers have pointed to the influence of American Jewry either in praise of…
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Finding Deeper Truths in Fiction
For weeks, many of us “Diaspora Jews” have kept ourselves neck-deep in news from the Middle East: jumping out of bed to check the front page, keeping the television on all night, refreshing Web sites for the latest headlines. Of course, our new routine pales in comparison to what it could be — dashing into…
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Sephardic Culture Enjoys a Renaissance — in Spain
Forty-seven years ago, when Moroccan farming engineer Jacobo Israel Garzón immigrated north to Spain for work, he found a country fiercely opposed to discussion — at least a discussion with anything positive to say — about its Jewish past. “In 1959 there wasn’t a book about Jews in Spain that wasn’t antisemitic,” said Israel Garzón,…
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A Shoah Story, From Israel
Our Holocaust By Amir Gutfreund, Translated by Jessica Cohen The Toby Press, 407 pages, $24.95. ‘Tain’t what a man sez, but wot he means that the traducer has got to bring over.” Thus Ezra Pound to W.H.D. Rouse, on literature. What a difference a definite article makes. In its Hebrew original, the title of Amir…
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Exploring the American-Israeli Alliance
Michelle Mart, a historian at Penn State University, adopts a novel approach to understanding the special relationship — a battle of “cultural narratives” within America that Israel won and the Arabs lost. In her view, an American culture in the aftermath of World War II that was truly inhospitable to antisemitism became wedded to a…
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Delving Into the Core of the Self
Yale University Press has just published “Life Is With Others,” a collection of essays written by the late Donald J. Cohen and various colleagues. Cohen, who succumbed to cancer in 2001 at the age of 61, directed the Yale Child Study Center for nearly two decades, conducted pioneering research into autism and Tourette’s Syndrome, and…
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Screening Chantal Akerman
For certain film buffs, Chantal Akerman is famous as the director of one of the screen’s most legendary endurance tests. Akerman’s masterpiece, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), as the precise title might indicate, is a remarkably focused three-and-a-half-hour study of the mundane routine of a Brussels housewife — the ultimate realist…
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