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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Horror Flicks
At the start of this portion, we have a continuation of the plagues, with the threat — and then the carrying out of the threat — of locusts. This is already the eighth plague. And as my ex-brother-in-law used to remark, it is much like the early scenes in horror movies, where somebody turns on…
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The Battle Over ‘Judea and Samaria’
One would expect someone as pro-Israel as The New York Times’ William Safire to know better. In his January 16 On Language column, he wrote: “In wartime, words are weapons; we have seen how Israelis and Palestinians are highly sensitive to connotations in their conflict. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon preferred to refer to land in…
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A Little Too Intimate
The Book of Trouble: A Romance By Ann Marlowe Harcourt, 288 pages, $23. * * *| As Ann Marlowe painfully illustrates in “The Book of Trouble: A Romance,” finding intimacy is not as easy as finding one’s way into someone’s pants. Just as intellectual repartee does not necessarily make for an exciting sex life, a…
The Latest
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The Unity of Opposites
Learning From the Tanya: Volume Two in the Definitive Commentary On the Moral and Mystical Teachings Of a Classic Work of Kabbalah By Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Jossey-Bass, 384 pages, $24.95. * * *| We Jews: Why Are We and What Should We Do? By Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Jossey-Bass, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Why…
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Heart-to-Heart Talk
Moishe, a man of indeterminate age in doctor’s garb, stands before the massive statues of a pharaoh’s mortuary temple on the west bank at Luxor. As Amelia Edwards noted at Abu Simbel (“A Thousand Miles Up the Nile”), there is an instant at dawn as light flushes the temple that transforms the great stone colossi….
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Looking Back January 27, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Famed pianist Arthur Rubenstein, who recently arrived in New York from Russia, no longer can be considered a greenhorn. While he was standing backstage, about half an hour before a concert at the Casino Theatre, a young choir singer who was under the impression that Rubenstein did not speak…
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A Beatnik Finds Treasure In His Grandfather’s Beats
A Manhattan record label and a Minnesota distributor/publisher of spoken word audio, including books and radio programs, are among the companies that have expressed interest in a rare collection of Jewish liturgical recordings made in the 1950s, much to the relief of Lionel Ziprin, who has been trying to get the recordings out in the…
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Aleppo on Ocean Parkway
From Baghdad to Brooklyn: Growing Up In a Jewish-Arabic Family in Midcentury America By Jack Marshall Coffee House Press, 256 pages, $16. * * *| To have an identity strung together with hyphens is to live in several worlds at once. “From Baghdad to Brooklyn,” Jack Marshall’s beautifully crafted memoir, evokes an entire galaxy. Author…
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Elegy for a Fighter
Barney Ross By Douglas Century Nextbook (Schocken), 205 pages, $19.95. * * *| If attitudes toward Jewish boxers do not offer an all-encompassing symbol of continuing change in the social and cultural tastes of American Jewry, they probably come close. One of the many revealing anecdotes in this marvelously insightful study of the immigrant generation’s…
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Foundation To Send Hebrew School Teachers to Israel
Phyllis Osher, who has been teaching Hebrew school students about Israel for years, has not been there herself since 1982. That will change in August, when Osher goes to Israel on a new program of the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, which will pay for 40 Hebrew and pre-school teachers to go to Israel for…
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Looking Back January 20, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD In New York, Sam Abelman’s First Street Saloon became the scene of a wild brawl after Abelman and his barkeep demanded payment of 10 cents from a group of about a dozen men who were playing billiards there. Abelman’s request for the dime was met with a barrage of…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: היסטאָריקערין וויווי לאַקס באַשרײַבט געשיכטע פֿון לאָנדאָנער ייִדישער פּרעסעVIDEO: Historian Vivi Laks tells history of the London Yiddish Press
שבֿע צוקער פֿירט דעם שמועס מיט וויווי לאַקס און ביידע לייענען פֿאָר עטלעכע פֿעליעטאָנען פֿון יענע צײַטן.
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Yiddish World Puppet Monty Pickle is guest on the Forward’s ‘Yiddish Word of the Day’
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Culture We tried to fix Hallmark’s Hanukkah problem. Here’s the movie we made instead
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Fast Forward Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
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