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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South African Challah?
Michael Cole from Toronto writes: “My wife’s South African relatives refer to a Shabbat or festival challah as a ‘kitke.’ This seems to be a uniquely South African term, unknown, as far as I am aware, even among other people of Lithuanian descent. [Mr. Cole is referring to the fact that South African Jewry originated…
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Joshua Venture: Gone for Good, or Ready for a Fresh Start?
After helping to launch some of the Jewish world’s most buzzed-about fledgling organizations in recent years, Joshua Venture closed its doors last spring after only five years of operation. As supporters evaluate exactly what went wrong, some of the group’s major funders have already moved on to new projects. Nonetheless, there is still a chance…
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Rabbi Sets a Message to Music
Shawn Zevit is practicing what he preaches. A Philadelphia-based Reconstructionist rabbi who serves as a visiting rabbi at Pittsburgh’s Congregation Dor Hadash, Zevit is also a singer, songwriter and guitarist with two full-length CDs to his credit. With musical influences ranging from The Beatles to indie rock, from soul to R&B, Zevit’s new album, “Sanctuary,”…
The Latest
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Mem Bernstein
MEM BERNSTEIN In 2002, Bernstein made our list as one of the most dynamic, if most media-shy, Jewish “venture philanthropists.” As a string of recent successes attest, her influence has only grown in the past three years. Bernstein oversees not one but two major foundations. Both were started with the money of her late husband,…
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Playing Fill-in-the-Blanks With a Father’s Life
Not Me By Michael Lavigne Random House, 320 pages, $24.95. Between what one is told and what one is able to infer, there lies a distant and beckoning truth: the Parent as Human Being. It glimmers beyond our grasp, always sought after but never obtained, the object of conjecture but never of understanding. For some,…
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Confessions
We human beings have a special adaptive mechanism called rationality. It allows us to prognosticate. We say “If A, then B.” If we wish to change B, perhaps we might change A. This is the good news. The bad news is that we are incapable of perceiving situations otherwise than as the syntheses of thesis…
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A Jewish Family Drama, Minus the Shmaltz
Judaism and parental ambition have been inextricable since the early days — the really early days, back to when old Jacob let his hopes get too high for poor Joseph. (Had Ivy League law schools existed back then, one can only imagine the arguments.) Immigrant tenacity, a tradition of literacy and just plain genetic stubbornness…
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Rare Texts
On November 15, Christie’s will auction off a collection of rare manuscripts from the private collection of the late Salman Schocken. The famous publisher of Franz Kafka, Gershom Scholem and S.Y. Agnon, Schocken was an avid collector of rare Jewish texts. Among the original manuscripts to be auctioned by Christie’s are poems by Hai Gaon,…
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Interfaith Music Hits Disparate Notes
In the grand, world-historical scheme of things, the Renaissance represented a huge leap forward for European Christendom. For Muslims and Jews — well, not so much. Islamic scholars furnished the classical texts that provided the underpinning for much Renaissance thought. Yet by the 15th century, the Islamic world itself had begun the long, slow, backward…
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The Sacred Ménage à Trois
The Bible’s stories tell of lives lived so long ago, in such a different clime, we look for difference and find types of ourselves. There are the women of today who choose to be childless, and there are women for whom childlessness is a calamity. Does their calamity compare with that of the Bible’s barren…
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November 11, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD The Forward received an emergency telegram from the Bund in Russia: “The forces of reaction are stretching us to the ends of our strength. The Black Hundreds have organized all over Russia. Jews are being murdered by the thousands. Entire towns and villages have been set ablaze: Akerman, Gaydiatsh,…
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