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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Holocaust Curriculum Shines Spotlight on Resistance
New Jersey mandated Holocaust education in its public schools more than a decade ago. But until now, something has been missing. The New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education recommended last summer that teachers add a new subject to the standard curriculum about the Shoah: Jewish partisan fighters. Although individual teachers may have broached the subject…
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Coincidentally Israeli Designers
To classify art based on geographical origin is to play a silly game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The Guggenheim exhibit The Aztec Empire recently showed the dangers of national taxonomies by including works of the Toltecs — whom the Aztecs sacrificed to their gods — and of the Olmecs, who are to…
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Photographer Puts the Whole Jewish World in Focus
Zion Ozeri has made his living photographing Jews all over the world, from the mountains of Yemen to the streets of New York to the jungles of Peru. He has exhibited his work in galleries and museums and has published his photographs in newspapers, books and magazines. And now, Ozeri is bringing his work to…
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Minors in Jewish Studies Make Major Gains
That explains how minor programs became possible, but there’s still the question of motivation: Why would a Catholic school set up a Jewish studies program? “It is part of the aspiration of Catholic colleges to be great colleges,” Fisher told the Forward. “Excellent colleges have Jewish studies; you can’t teach Western civilization without it.” The…
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Celebrating a Composer Who Celebrates Multiple Cultures
Composer Osvaldo Golijov is being celebrated at New York City’s Lincoln Center with a month-long series of performances of his works, titled The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov. Musical America named Golijov composer of the year. His latest release, “Ayre” — based on traditional songs and poems in Ladino, Arabic and Hebrew — evokes the period…
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Adults Explore Faith in Holocaust Class
In the face of injustice and suffering, can one believe in God? Why do bad things happen to good people? How can civilized people torture and murder? In 160 cities around the world, students recently explored these questions in “Beyond Never Again,” a new adult education course about the Holocaust. Chabad’s Jewish Learning Institute offers…
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A Writer, a Woman And a Jew
There’s an old chestnut, “The more specific the writing, the more universal its appeal.” You can say, “Six-year-old Lisa Levine is afraid of loud noises.” Or you can say, “When 6-year-old Lisa Levine hears thunder, she shuts her eyes, kisses the tiny Jewish star hanging on the chain around her neck, and says the Sh’ma.”…
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Language Lover Gets Back to His Roots
HebrewTalk: 101 Hebrew Roots and the Stories They Tell By Joseph Lowin EKS Publishing Company, 220 pages, $27.95. * * *| Joseph Lowin comes from a long line of lovers of the Hebrew language — from medieval grammarians Menahem ben Saruk, Dunash Ben Librat, ben Hayujj and ibn Janakh, who invented Hebrew grammar, and the…
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The Second Tragedy at Bergen-Belsen
After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945 By Ben Shephard Schocken Books, 288 pages, $25. * * *| Schocken Books, 288 pages, $25.In the middle of the night, when my father cannot sleep, he will pick up the phone in London and call me in New York, where he knows it is still evening, to…
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Jacob’s Finale
This final portion of Genesis is chiefly concerned with Jacob’s preparations for his approaching death. These occupy three successive scenes. In the first he has Joseph, in private, swear to bury him, not in Egypt where he will die, but in the burial place of his fathers in Canaan. In the second, again in private…
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January 13, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Most of the tenants of a tenement on Manhattan’s Chrystie Street confuse the names of two of the other residents: Rosenthal, the watchmaker, and Rosenblum, the building super. But the two men couldn’t be more different. When Rosenthal hung a fine-looking sign on his door advertising his watch repair…
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