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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Korah; or, the Possibility of Change
This week’s Torah portion, Korah, tells a spectacular story of rebellion and punishment. Korah challenges Moses and Aaron’s rule with a deceptively simple argument: “All of the community is holy.… What makes you so special that you raise yourselves up?” (Numbers 16:3) Coming as it does from his very own tribe, Moses falls into despair….
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Ethical Designs
You don’t need to be enrolled in art school to know that the philosophies of green design and smart design are becoming, in many circles, the only acceptable way to build anything from an apartment building to a pair of shoes. With social and environmental responsibility at the forefront of the minds of most contemporary…
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Metropolitan New York
Exhibits Resistance: The courageous stories of 27 men and women who, some 60 years ago, resisted Nazi occupation in Belgium are included in a documentary exhibition, Images of Resistance: Belgium, 1940-1945. The display features large-scale digital photographs, wartime images, contemporary portraits and personal testimonies of the resisters. Presented by Yeshiva University Museum, the exhibit is…
The Latest
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Through The Indie Lens
The judges responsible for selecting the films for this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival had their work cut out for them. The festival broke its record with some 450 entries — a testament to the fact that independent Jewish cinema is alive and thriving. Now in its 26th year, the San Francisco Jewish Film…
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June 30
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD A rumor that children in New York City public schools are having their tonsils taken out in school is spreading like wildfire in the Jewish community. Although there is no truth to the allegation, hysterical crowds of screaming mothers in the Brownsville and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn went running…
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Hannah and Her Brothers
If “The First Time I Was 20” teaches viewers anything, it’s that teenage boys in the 1960s were sophisticated enough to recognize that beauty is only skin deep, and antisemitic classmates can become best pals if only they get to know the real you. In short, Lorraine Levy’s wisp of a movie, in French with…
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Spinoza: Hero, Infidel, Celebrity
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity By Rebecca Goldstein Nextbook/Schocken, 304 pages, $19.95. * * *| Betrayal haunts the image of 17th-century philosopher Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza like no other Jewish historical celebrity. For centuries, the name of this radical pantheist, pioneering biblical critic and defector from Judaism — once described as “the…
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…and Muse
Conversation With Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel By Goce Smilevski Translated by Filip Korzenski Northwestern University Press, 152 pages, $16.95. * * *| A few centuries too late, it seems that Spinoza’s time has finally come. In a world in which many Jews are yet again attempting to assert a secular identity as the dialectic antipode…
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A Painter on Earth Whose Brush Reaches the Heavens
‘I cannot imagine German culture without Judaism,” painter Anselm Kiefer said. “One thing is that Germans committed the immense crime of killing Jews. The other is that they amputated themselves. They took half of German culture and killed it.” As a result, Kiefer, who was born to Catholic parents in Donaueschingen, Germany, during the final…
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Fateful Correspondence
Paper Kisses: A True Love Story By Reinhard Kaiser Translated by Anthea Bell Other Press, 120 pages, $13.95. * * *| Like Reinhard Kaiser, the author of “Paper Kisses” — a true, epistolary tale of two star-crossed lovers during the Holocaust — my father was a collector of stamps. And like Kaiser, his hobby was…
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June 23
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD As the city of Bialystok burns in a massive pogrom, its Jews have begun fighting back heroically. From the rooftops and from windows, Jews have begun to shoot back with rifles and handguns. As to who gave the call to attack the Jews, all fingers point to the government…
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